I didn’t intend to watch “Ted Lasso” because, despite the rave reviews, the show’s premise and the vignettes I’d heard repeated led me to conclude it would be formulaic drivel. But puppy-induced insomnia got the better of me, and I started watching it recently. I was right; it is formulaic drivel.
But the fans and critics were right too — it’s fun, and the acting is good. Also, because the story revolves around a soccer club, there are many fit young men in various states of undress to look at.
In other news, this may be the goofiest picture of any dog, ever:
This is the “I will fight you to the death, Giant Scary Hand!” look.
Open thread!
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
Lymie
There is a certain freshness to the characters and the writing that elevated it, for me. And the emotional trauma that I experience when I engage with many shows was not a problem. So many shows have that “I Love Lucy” aura of watching a slow motion accident…
danielx
Dog is totally adorbs, as the kids say.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Geeno
That picture is one of the reasons we all love dogs.
Phylllis
Goofy pup pup is goofy. No Apple TV here, and had not planned to add it. However, the raves for Ted Lasso have me wavering. We did get through Get Back, which was great. I was reading an article about it the other day & the author was commenting on how much film there was of John sitting around with a blank stare. I thought ‘that would be the heroin kicking in’.
Baud
I don’t have Apple TV so it’s a moot point, but I never found the clips of Ted Lasso I’ve seen enticing.
Baud
Via reddit, funny cat gif
https://i.redd.it/iav67vcb8fb81.gif
Soprano2
So, update on my cat Killer. When it got really cold here back around New Year’s Day, we made him come in the house along with the gray striped tabby who has been hanging out at our house for the past couple of months. The gray tabby’s name is Gary, and he’s a sweetie and a talker. I guesstimate that they’re about the same age, or within a couple of months of each other. Killer is shyer; he doesn’t like to be picked up, and being with you on the couch definitely has to be his idea. They both adapted to being inside pretty well considering that there wasn’t any time for dog or inside cat “introductions”, since temps around zero are an emergency for outside cats! They’ve seen and interacted with our dogs in the yard for a few months, so that probably helped a lot. I think our cat Eliot up in the bedroom was a surprise, though – lots of angry hissing by all the cats, especially Gary. Killer and Gary will now lay in our laps when we’re on the couch – hubby’s more than mine, and they aren’t worried about the dogs anymore. Gary is going to the vet today to get neutered and checked out. I would have preferred to get that done before he came into the house, but again it was an emergency and unfortunately I don’t have a room where I can keep a cat isolated for days. So he was in the bathroom this morning kind of disgruntled, because had to have no food or water after midnight. I’m pretty sure that he’s healthy; he seems to be fine. I’m crossing my fingers that I’m right.
Tony Jay
That is one bloody adorable pup!
You were wondering yesterday if I had any further opinions on the Partygate Scandal currently grinding its way up Flobalob’s colonic track? As it so happens, yes I do. Hope you don’t mind if I drop it here? Open Thread and all.
Say what you will about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (I know I have), but when it comes to clinging onto his perch at the top of politics’ pointy pole the manshaped needhole has a grip like a bonobo on the last stroke of a wanking marathon. He wanted so very, very much to be Prime Minister that he created an entire fictional persona to advance that ambition and rode it through two uninterrupted decades of over-privileged unaccountability. Now he’s got his arse wedged into the seat of absolute temporal power he’s not for shifting until he’s either removed via industrial explosives or someone (maybe a friendly oligarch, maybe an unfriendly one) makes it undeniably worth his while. Hark, is that the sound of a ticking detonator I hear? Amidst the din of angry Russian voices? You know, it just might be.
Last night I mentioned the latest well-timed leak to emerge from within the upper reaches of the Tory Party machine, this one revealing that Johnson and his inner circle, after weeks spent at first denying they’d ever held illegal lockdown parties, then constantly scrambling to come up with ever more outlandish explanations for why the parties they were shown to have held weren’t actually parties/were within the rules/weren’t really illegal because I’ve got a note from my doctor, etc, had held a large ‘Bring Your Own Bottle’ garden party at Downing St on May 20th, 2020 that Flobalob himself attended and his own Personal Private Secretary sent out over 100 e-mail invitations for. Bang to rights? Certainly. There’s no way out of this one. The slovenly shit has clearly lied to Parliament when he denied knowing anything about Downing St parties and should, if he has so much as a scintilla of shame, resign immediately.
Heh. Yeah. No. Have you met the guy? Not a chance.
Instead, and entirely within what passes for his ‘character’, the mendacious solipsist rolled on up at the House of Commons yesterday with his thinning barnet carefully scruffed up like a fluffy dandelion and launched into a contrarian form of ‘apology’ that basically, when you strip away the flobalobbing, boiled down to:
“I was working so hard last May that I had to have a break from work, but when I stopped working briefly and walked into the garden of my workplace, I found all of these hard-working people having a socially-distanced drink, at work. Believing that this many workers all being together at their workplace meant that this must be a work event, my working girl girlfriend and I walked around for 25 minutes thanking all these workers for their hard work, then went back inside Downing St, to keep on working. In hindsight I may have been mistaken about this being a work event, but I’m not to blame. Alas”
Yes, everyone laughed, some incredulously, many bitterly, but the Stout Scumbag had his painfully lawyered lie and he was going to hold onto it like Trump with a thirty-cent cheque. Never mind that it didn’t matter one iota what he did or did not think was going on in the garden that evening, that’s irrelevant, the whole thing was 100% against his own Government’s very clear rules that everyone else had to obey on pain of criminal charges. Never mind that he himself admitted during the course of his faux apologia that the main purpose of this ‘work event’ that he claimed he knew nothing about (he didn’t receive a copy of the e-mail invitation, we’re told, which someone should really tell him is in fact traditional when you are the frigging host) was for him to thank staffers for working so hard during Lockdown… ergo, he knew all about it. Never mind that his knowledge of and presence at this ‘work event’ was in direct contradiction to all of the claims of innocence he’d been making in the weeks before Christmas. Never mind any of a thousand other obvious holes in the tattered shawl of denial he’s wrapped around his naked guilt. He’d said his piece and everyone should leave him alone, the matter was now in the hands of Sue Gray, the well-connected civil-servant with a reputation for burying uncomfortable evidence of wrongdoing whose inquiry into Number 10’s predilection for party-hearty booze-ups was still ongoing and would be revealed as soon as she’d completed gathering the evidence and handed it over to the person with the authority to decide if anything in it was actionable (Johnson himself) and then sent to the person with jurisdiction over what punishments should or should not be applied (Simon Case, the cabinet secretary who had to step aside from heading the inquiry last month because he himself was a target of investigation).
There’s probably a good old-fashioned Latin, French or German word for how fucked up that whole system is, but I’m just a modern guy, so I’m going with Trumpy. I’m sure everyone understands exactly what that implies.
It’s bollocks, all of it. Yesterday was all about getting the Bullington Bunter through the next few 24-hour obstacles and nothing more. The only Tories initially willing to do the TV/Radio circuit to defend him after Prime Minister’s Questions were the ‘characters’, the kind of obviously mentally-hilarious fruits of forbidden love between harelipped conjoined-cousins who are usually kept well away from recording devices should they embarrass the Party with their digressions on Hollow Earth Theory and the need for more Primary School teachers with a grounding in Eugenics. Not a single Minister was initially willing to tweet in his defence, which is a sure sign of impending doom. The usual suspects flooded out later on to jabber the approved script that Johnson had “fully apologised” and “we should all wait for the results of the inquiry”, but one thing that the likes of Dominic ‘The Steroidal Peanut’ Raab, Pritti ‘Leather Knickers’ Patel, Kwasi ‘Poundshop Renfield’ Kwarteng, Sajid ‘Sontar’s Shame’ Javid, Jacob ‘Gravemould and Incense’ Rees-Mogg and Nadine ‘The Mills and Boon Goon’ Dorries share is that they are all to one extent or another Johnson’s people. They wouldn’t get in any other Cabinet. Hell, on performance alone they wouldn’t even get an interview at Dunder Mifflin, never mind Wernham Hogg. Their loyalty is one of self-preservation, naked desperation and entirely performative.
Some of them probably harbour illusionary dreams of being anointed as Johnson’s heir-apparent when the noose finally tightens and going on to compete against the likes of Rishi ‘Mahogany Mannequin’ Sunak (who was very obviously very far away from London today) Liz ‘Z-List Thatcher’ Truss and Jeremy ‘Utter and Complete’ Hunt in the ensuing leadership battle as the ‘candidate of spite’, vote for me to show the Party Elites what ‘we’ think of backstabbers. I don’t rate their chances, but these are Tories we’re talking about, who knows what ghastly urges tickle their withered amygdalas? What is certain is that all the best access-journalists are being briefed like mad by the various factions of the festering Tory body politic that MPs of all persuasions are pretty much done with Johnson’s spiralling freefall, and the only question remaining is when and how he gets the boot. Now? Tomorrow? In a few months so that he can take all the blame for the Omicron deathrate. After the May local elections so he can take the blame for them as well? Should they stab him in the front to put murky blue water between his corruption and the Party or should they let him ooze out with his pants still on and let him pretend it’s just because he wants to spend more time with his families?
Whatever, he’s done. The Tories can’t sustain this kind of self-inflicted mutilation for much longer, not if they want to have any hopes whatsoever of redonning their patrician togas and conning enough awful but not entirely evil voters into sticking with them rather than scrawling a protest-X in the Liberal-Democrat column at the next General Election. Some quite senior backbenchers are now coming out and saying that he simply has to resign regardless of what Grey’s inquiry reveals. And they’re obviously right. He just admitted before Parliament that there was an illegal gathering at Downing Street and he attended it, end of story. This isn’t going to stop, either. None of these revelations are due to good old fashioned investigative journalism (cue a montage of confused expressions passing across the round, white faces of Britain’s elite infotainers as they hear the sounds but don’t quite grasp the concept) they’re all due to high-level leaks being spoon fed at precise intervals to news outlets where the pressure to bury anything damaging to Tories is less fundamental to the management structure. The current conventional wisdom is that it’s all Dominic Cummings, the Megamind action-figure who used to be ‘Johnson’s Brain’ until ‘Johnson’s Babymomma’ had him turfed out. That might be true. Cummings certainly wants everyone to think it’s him, and the recent occasion where he came to Johnson’s aid by confirming that photographs of another lockdown-busting garden booze-up (in which he features) really was a ‘work-event’ (oh, that’s convenient, isn’t it?) might just be an example of clever-clever fuckery to keep the News Media intrigued.
Oh, and while we’re in the vicinity of ‘convenient’, isn’t it ‘convenient’ that this May 20th party took place just two days before the newspapers published their expose (leaked, again) of Cummings’ own lockdown-busting trip to Barnard Castle and the ensuing circling of the Tory wagons around Johnson’s then-ally that, more than anything, blew a bloody great hole through the very idea of Lockdown being a national effort we were all in together. It was very odd at the time the lengths Johnson and Co were willing to go to to protect Cummings from paying any price for flouting the Covid rules, now we know why. They were shoring up the dam of entitled unaccountability in order to keep their own secrets off the radar. We can tell this is true because of the absolute refusal of the News Media to even mention the Barnard Castle scandal when they talk about Cummings’ role in this spate of leaking. Yet another massive story the British Media missed/ignored gets flushed down the memory hole in order to keep their Narrative unwrinkled.
Whatever, I don’t really care who it is. It doesn’t actually matter who is doing the leaking, only that they are leaking, and that the News Media seem to be under orders not to show any great interest in exposing the Golden Goose to public scrutiny. It’s just accepted that this is part of an internal Tory Party power struggle to oust Johnson in favour of some other figurehead, as if the country being put through hell (again!) as part of an incestuous mud-wrestle between international donor interests was perfectly normal. It’s not, though. This is a country of nearly 70 million people, not a fictional sequel to Trading Places. 170,000 + people dead to Covid and probably twice that as a result of Austerity are not fucking pork belly futures or frozen fucking concentrated orange juice. I resent in the strongest possible terms the implicit understanding that this is all just some exciting game for Very Important People to indulge in when they get bored with fomenting wars and establishing hyper-efficient child slavery supply chains, a game that I’m somehow obliged to pretend isn’t taking place so that undereducated children with brains as shrunken as their souls can have careers oohing and ahhing at the shadows cast on the cave wall. I know they’re shadows. I know how they’re made. The fire is in the other direction and the smoke is getting thicker by the minute, so point your fucking cameras over there before we all choke to death, you preening gobshites.
Ahem. Where was I?
What should be happening is a Metropolitan Police investigation and the levelling of retrospective fines on everyone who was at this May 20th party plus charges of perverting the course of justice by concealing evidence of a crime. Why that’s not already happening is obvious and all of a piece with the incredibly pervasive institutional rot that runs through every single pillar of our oh so very august British Establishment. It’s been mentioned here already but it’s worth repeating, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Dame Cressida Dick (stop sniggering at the back) has argued that her force does not investigate crimes retrospectively which, correct me if I’m wrong, fails the “does this sound like utter bollocks?” test on every level. When pressed further the Met has claimed that they didn’t push ahead with investigating claims of lockdown-busting parties around Westminster because, duh, anyone who’d attended one would obviously just deny everything to avoid incriminating themselves, so why bother? Honest to Zeus, the crime rates around London must be absolutely stratospheric if this is how Dame Dick’s boys and girls in (Tory) blue respond to lawbreaking, but then, no, it’s only lawbreaking by the (very hard) right people that gets this kind of ridiculously gentle touch. If you’re black or poor or in any way lefty the Met will fuck you over so hard and fast you’ll be pregnant with twins before they get around to charging you with resisting arrest. It’s pretty much always been this way, but maybe it’s indicative of just how passively obsequious Dick’s Met has been to Tory Power (and of what the Establishment is suddenly willing to have said about said obsequiousness) that a former assistant commissioner has felt inspired to admit in a timely interview that he was ousted in 2009 after he launched a leak inquiry that led to the arrest of then Tory frontbencher Damien Green. Dick was his deputy back then, and when asked if he thought the experience had influenced Dick’s appetite for investigating Tories his response was blunt “She saw what happened to me”.
It looks like Cressida is getting an overt nudge, and maybe something will come of it. Maybe it’s to do with the report in The Independent alleging that Number 10 staff have been told to ‘clean up’ their phones to “get rid of anything that looks bad”. If sources are telling friendly reporters that it certainly looks like underlings are beginning to emerge from the drunken haze of Brextremist triumphalism only to realise that they’re working for a bunch of crooks who will be out of office and unable to shield them from consequences sooner rather than later. Things fall apart, the centre far-right cannot hold, and like it or not there are a lot of people involved in running this bureaucracy of banal evil who would really rather not have the threat of criminal prosecution for obstruction of justice hanging over them when they’d much rather be looking forward to planning their summer holibobs in the Seychelles.
Never mind all that, though. The real ‘oh shit’ moment of yesterday happened at the High Court where the Good Law Project (great cause, hard work, absolute bellend of a top dog) won a judgement that the Government’s so-called VIP lane for PPE contracts, the mechanism via which they channelled tens of billions of pounds in public money into the pockets of cronies, chums and Party donors at the height of the pandemic, was illegal. So much money, sums vast enough to give Smaug the Golden horde envy, and all of it will now eventually have to be accounted for as part of a massive criminal investigation. That’s probably going to be Johnson’s main legacy to the Tory Party. Not Brexit, not Covid, those fuck-ups would have happened without him, but the sheer scale of corruption exposed by the VIP feeding frenzy, that’s going to hurt them for a long, long time.
Nice. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of reptiles. And there’s only another two years of it to go. Lucky, lucky UK.
My cold is going, though. So it’s not all bad.
sab
@Lymie: “Aura of slow motion accident” What a good description of traditional bickering family sitcoms and why I hate them so much.
Betty Cracker
We added Apple TV (after vowing we would not expand subscriptions) because hubby wanted to watch “Foundation.” He says the series departs from the Asimov novel significantly, but he seems to be enjoying it so far.
I didn’t find “Ted Lasso” clips or descriptions compelling either, but the show works somehow (for me). It’s just charming and winsome. Even the industrial strength irritant created when Mitt Romney and Kyrsten Sinema teamed up on a “Ted Lasso” stunt couldn’t pre-ruin the show for me.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: That’s because they hide the good stuff; you have to pay to see it.
Except for that free week thingie. Then you don’t have to pay to see it.
opiejeanne
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I feel like all the different subscriptions one needs right now is like recreating cable without the convenience of one stop shopping.
Elizabelle
Betty C, I love your little pups. Life is better with a doggo (or kitteh or pet) in it.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh: I guess that’s better than when movie ads put all the good scenes in the trailer.
OzarkHillbilly
So happy to know I misinterpreted that sentence.
UncleEbeneezer
When it goes dark/serious I think it is one of the best shows on tv. But the rest of the time (which is most of the show) I find it cute but only mildly funny. It makes me chuckle here and there but never really gut-laugh or think “wow, that was clever!” And the wholesome/earnestness gets so sappy at times that I can only roll my eyes. The Christmas episode was so close to a Hallmark Channel movie that we almost bailed because of it. But I’m sorta glad we didn’t because I did very much enjoy the more serious episodes, and the relationship with the Psychologist. The cast does have excellent comedic timing for sure. But alot of the jokes just don’t land for me.
So, I really don’t get the hype. I mean I get why people like the show, and like I said, I think it is a good show (sometimes bordering on great). But not a sweep-the-Emmys level good. It’s not a show I think about afterward (unlike For All Mankind or I May Destroy You or Atlanta). It’s more like a slightly funnier version of The Detectorists.
I do like that it explores toxic happiness and presents a more healthy version of masculinity. And of course the focus on anxiety is great. But for comedy I just like a little more (okay a lot more) edge. I think Sex Education covers much of the same territory but is much funnier while doing so. Dickinson too. That said, glad people enjoy TL as we all need humor and joy in these difficult times. I just put this particular show much further down my list than most fans that I know. But then again I thought Schitt’s Creek was not funny at all and turned off The Good Place after 15 minutes (two other shows that everyone raved about), so I know my taste is definitely outside the norm on this stuff.
mrmoshpotato
What a goofball!
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: Since you have AppleTV, I highly recommend For All Mankind and Dickinson. FAM has the same feel as Battlestar Galactica where just about every episode feels like a season finale. Lots of plot twists that will make your jaw drop, and very progressive/feminist. And Dickinson gives historical/period art a really interesting and updated spin. Also super-feminist while still incredibly fun. Just my $.02
mrmoshpotato
@Tony Jay:
Oh good lord! ???
Betty
@Tony Jay: As ususal, a wonderful way with words, but “tickled their withered amydalas” is a gem.
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay: No wonder you feel better, now that there’s the prospect of seeing that collection of evil cockwaffles get their richly deserved comeuppance.
Ken
Very nice. Not that the rest of the tirade wasn’t, but this has that stiletto-like touch that stands out.
narya
I think the thing that grabbed me w/r/t Ted Lasso (and The Good Place and Schitt’s Creek, for that matter) is that they all show folks who are genuinely trying to be better, to grow, and not in an after school special kind of way. Too many things seem to be mean humor (or scary/horror, which I cannot watch)–the slow-motion accident is sort of a version of that, in a way. They all challenge toxic masculinity, too, and THAT is a pleasure to see, absolutely. I ended up doing AppleTV because I got a free year (with a new phone); I do Netflix, and some premium cable channels (so I can watch Formula 1), but otherwise, no Hulu, HBO, whatever. I just don’t watch enough of the premium stuff to make it worthwhile.
NotMax
Don’t have Apple+. That said, Club de Cuervos on Netflix was bingeworthy fun* (included in that is the between seasons 3 and 4 spin-off mini-series The Ballad of Hugo Sánchez).
N.B.: The opening minutes of the initial episode are way over the top and, while a springboard for a plot point which comes up later on, not necessarily indicative of the the tenor and pace of the series as a whole.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Truth.
FelonyGovt
I love the women characters on Ted Lasso. So rare on a show that’s (at least nominally) about men’s sports.
Chris
A decade ago, I went through all five seasons of The A-Team thanks to Netflix.
That was formulaic drivel: pretty much the same episode over and over. But even after that had gotten boring, and even after they tried and failed to revive it with their “tune to see which eighties celebrity you’re too young to remember will guest-star THIS week!” routine, and then with a change of premise… I was still guaranteed to have at least a few laugh-out-loud moments per episode, usually from B.A. and Murdock’s shenanigans, and there was always some cathartic fun in watching the gang beat up the overgrown-schoolyard-bully-of-the-week. So I kept watching through to the end.
Formulaic drivel doesn’t mean bad. There’s something to be said for comfort food.
Dorothy A. Winsor
We don’t get Apple TV either. At the moment, I’m watching Wheel of Time on Prime. I like the visuals. I’m not good at imagining all those details of place, dress, etc, so I find it satisfying when someone else does it for me. There are a lot of chase and fight scenes, which bore me.
For tension lessening entertainment, we’re watching Seinfeld.
OzarkHillbilly
No goggles required: ‘Tearless’ onions go on sale in UK supermarkets
This is an offense against nature!
zhena gogolia
@Baud: But you aren’t forced to have Fox News, so that makes it all worth it.
Tony Jay
As ever, it feels so much better out than it does in.
One of these days the howling shoal of hellbandits will shut up long enough for me to write a novel or something, but that day is not today!
Betty Cracker
@Ken: I noticed that one too. Little gems like that make reading Tony Jay such a delight.
Percysowner
This is a big deal Redistricting: Ohio Supreme Court strikes down state House and Senate maps
The Republican Chief Justice actually did the right thing and voted that the map was unconstitutional. The basic argument was that, when the Constitutional Amendment calling for bipartisan maps was passed in 2015 stating no plan “shall be drawn primarily to favor or disfavor a political party” there wasn’t a “just kidding” clause. Of course 3 other Republican Justices, include DeWine’s son said there was a “just kidding” clause and the voters didn’t mean that Republicans couldn’t just gerrymander themselves into power forever.
Chris
@Percysowner:
Yeah, I was surprised not to see any posts about this yet.
Here’s hoping it sticks.
opiejeanne
@OzarkHillbilly: The onions we’ve grown the past few years are just deadly, so I picked up some swim goggles and they live in the onion bowl on the counter. If I forget them, or think I can power through since it’s only a couple of little ones, I end up washing my face and putting them on. Our kids laughed when they saw the goggles, but we got even, made them cut up some onions for us.
Tony Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
@Betty:
@Ken:
Was it the esteemed Dorothy A. Winsor on this very site who once advised “Draft One – Ideas, Draft Two – Structure and Plot, Draft Three – Obscene physical humour jokes and personal insults”?
Feels like it was. Whoever said it, I took it to heart.
NotMax
Reticent to despoil it with something so crass as politics but this seems to be the only morning thread.
Nevada nutcase.
cope
For reasons known only to my twelve year old self, I am particularly appreciative of all the swearing in Ted Lasso. Also, having lettered in soccer in college (D 3) and coached at the high school level for twenty eight years, I am glad to see the sport get some air play. Oh yeah, I am also a bit of an Anglophile so there’s that appeal as well.
Anyway
@NotMax:
What’s the SHowtime/Hulu series you mentioned was worth watching recently? I am in a teevee rut
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Tony Jay: Sounds right to me!
OzarkHillbilly
@opiejeanne: For me, the pain makes the flavor all the more enjoyable: “See how I suffered for this???” ;-)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@NotMax: She sounds nice
Just One More Canuck
@mrmoshpotato: “ghastly urges tickle their withered amygdalas”
When I see Tony’s name, I freshen my coffee and settle in for a great read
NotMax
@Anyway
Methinks maybe Black Sails? Originally on Starz (so gratuitous nudity alert), currently available on Hulu. Starts out kind of rough but seems to be finding its sea legs as I slowly progress through it. Do realize it won’t be everyone’s cup o’ grog.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: We need pictures and videos
Gin & Tonic
@OzarkHillbilly: I still remember the time I used a food processor to grate fresh horseradish.
NotMax
@Dorothy A. Winsor
A palate cleanser: move over, crop circles.
;)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@NotMax: Love the advice not to venture onto that ice!
JMG
Ted Lasso was the first and only TV show in history to have sports as its milieu and not completely stink. This is an accomplishment. Sports fiction is very very hard to pull off in any form, as after all real sports are make-believe at their core.
OzarkHillbilly
@Gin & Tonic: I use an old coffee grinder for all my dried hot peppers. In the well ventilated storage room.
Ken
@Dorothy A. Winsor: As if it weren’t obvious that you’d be sucked through the dimensional vortex and find yourself in some weird alternate universe.
Yarrow
@Tony Jay: I see Rees-Mogg is doing his best to break up the Union by insulting what remains of the Scottish Tories. SNP will be enjoying that.
Don’t know if you’ve seen this Twitter thread but thought you’d enjoy the imagery.
I particularly like “poncey topiary” as an image. Heh.
Chris
@NotMax:
I enjoyed that show a lot. It does start slow but I’m glad I stuck with it.
I always did find it kind of weird that it was a Treasure Island prequel, though. It works just fine as its own story with zero connection to the novel.
Betty Cracker
@JMG: That’s an intriguing premise, but I’m not sure I agree. “Coach” and “Friday Night Lights” weren’t my favorite shows ever, but they weren’t completely terrible. Still, it’s interesting that there aren’t more good TV shows about sports, so maybe you’re onto something. There are plenty of great movies about sports, but a dearth of quality series.
Anyway
@NotMax:
Yes, Starz not Showtime — I misremembered. Thanks, will check it out this weekend.
NotMax
@JMG
See #27 above.
;)
Betty Cracker
@Gin & Tonic: My husband attempted to make prepared horseradish from scratch one time, and we learned three things. 1) Upon purchasing the raw material, we immediately deduced why the root is named after a horse, 2) the cooking process produces riot control-quality tear gas, and 3) it’s best just to buy horseradish in little glass jars.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I have the same issue with books. I seem to have a very low tolerance for the emotional trauma.
That said, apparently “bad things happen” is deeply embedded in our story telling as a species. I once heard a director define tragedy as bad things happening to the characters as an inevitable result of their own personality and choices. That was a revelation to me. It isn’t just “life sucks” but “we make our own life suck”. I still don’t want to watch a lot of it, but that was really interesting.
You’re probably talking about comedy, but even there… my wife once heard the instruction in a writing workshop that you should “put your characters up in an apple tree, and then start throwing apples at them”. I’ve taken improv comedy and there’s much the same idea, that you’ve got to create a problem. And then once you create it, you’ve got to make it worse.
Otherwise there’s no story.
NotMax
@Anyway
Always feel it is improvident not to put in the little disclaimer about that network.
There’s a reason we’ll never see an original Peanuts special on Starz.
;)
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@opiejeanne: I remember the opening chapter of “Like Water for Chocolate” includes a Mexican old-wives’ claim that putting a piece of bread on your head will help control the onion fumes.
I’ve never tested the theory.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Tolkien says something like good times are pleasant to live through but make bad stories.
One reason there are so many court/police and hospital shows is that those occur at crisis points in people’s lives, so they make good stories. I’ve always thought that adolescence is a crisis point in everyone’s life (one we probably never completely get over), and that’s what drives YA stories.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: If anyone decides to test this, we want pics
Tony Jay
@Yarrow:
Oh, that’s nice. “bottomless chasm of wobbling, thought-free jelly” also hits all of my joy buttons.
That’s the thing. The ALL knew who and what he was, but they still spent years pretending that behind the “poncey topiary” was a cunning politician with a talent for boosterism. They were wrong. There was always just a selfish bastard to whom every single other person in the whole, wide world was just a projection on the screen of his own personal vanity.
And these are the people who crucified British History’s Greatest Monster for thinking Palestinians are human beings, workers who aren’t executive directors deserve proper wages and kids shouldn’t starve. What a bunch of vandals.
As for Jacobius Rhesus-Negative, he’s just doing exactly what the Demon-Lords of Seinnan Yb’Desiar put him on this plane of existence to do; drag focus away from inconvenient headlines by being as offensively elitist as he can manage, and as you can see, he can manage quite a lot.
Woodrow/asim
Let me try that again, with my new nym. Oops!
Betty Cracker
@Yarrow: This was my favorite bit:
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@narya: Yes this is it for me too. I’m only a few episodes in (we didn’t have Apple+ until a few days ago when we got a free 3 months ’cause my wife got a new iPhone). People trying to be better people – the main character is thoroughly likeable and good and I find the humor and overall good naturedness of the show enjoyable. The most implausible aspect is that a college football coach (which, the more we learn the more it seems like they’re all or nearly all gratuitous assholes) fits that personality type. But…I’ve been way into many other shows that required more suspension of disbelief that Ted Lasso so I’ll keep watching.
MisterDancer
I think I’ve gushed about Ted Lasso on here, before. But yes, it’s a very different show than For All Mankind, which I also enjoy.
Why Lasso? Because, for me, exploring the limits of masculinity and positivity — two issues I, and I think a lot of people, struggle with — in a (mostly) comedic setting really matters. I’m not a sitcom person, I’m not really looking for belly laugh-shows, but I am invested in exploring these themes without having to have heaps of “realism” — frankly, I have enough of that in the real world, and don’t need it on my TV in many cases. And Lasso‘s ambitions in that framework make it far more interesting than most sitcoms — although I’ll easily say it’s not the same kind of ambition as what little I’ve seen/heard for works like Kevin can go F*** Himself, which looks fascinating, if dark.
There’s also an interesting critique of Lasso that I’ll point people too; I think it’s valid, if written before 2nd season aired: https://judedoyle.medium.com/im-getting-pretty-sick-of-the-one-good-man-5761c337854b
And to be clear — there’s truth, there, that a lot of people are thirsty for someone to tell them that being a White Guy from America is A-OK. and I think that’s…not really what the show is saying, even in the 1st season. [SPOILER]Ted’s breakdown, and who helps him, is not accidental on the part of the show; to me, in my watching, it’s a clear sign that his actions are open to criticism. [END SPOILER]But I think it’s easy to miss, and that’s always a problem when you’re trying to be critical of a positive POV character like Ted.
And just to note about For All Mankind — it’s interesting that it’s the first “original” work by Ronald D. Moore. Moore’s done Trek, kick-started Battlestar Galatica‘s reboot, headed the adaptation of Outlander (itself based on a book series that’s a Doctor Who fanfic with the serials filed off)…and For All really fells like him coming back to build an alternative backstory for a Trek-like Federation. It’s like it’s his love letter to the show he loved, and gave him his start.
NotMax
@Dorothy A. Winsor
Have a kickass (IMHO) title for a YA novel and nothing else.
Frankly think it would make for a fun round robin project, handing off each chapter to different authors (repetition of writers among them not excluded).
The Three Musketeens.
;)
Ken
I see what you did there.
Miss Bianca
Ooh, SQUEEE, Pete Puppy SQUEEEEE!
Honestly, I feel like this is what I live for nowadays. I’m pathetic.
Haven’t seen Ted Lasso yet (if it comes out on DVD I’d like to watch it!).
Did just rip through Mare of Easttown, which is set in my pal D’s neck of the natal woods. I kept pestering him for local color details. Oh, yeah, and Kate Winslet was pretty awesome. Actually, the whole cast was pretty awesome. I did manage to figure out who the murderer was going to be and predict the major twists and turns that preceded it, so I can haz script writer job now? : )
Now working through Freaks and Geeks, a one-season wonder from the turn of the century set during 1980 – in other words, my senior year of high school. And it’s set in Michigan, obviously SE Michigan, which is where I grew up, so I’m guessing that at least one of the show runners must have grown up there too. It’s fun, but some of it is really making me squirm, in that, “oh, God, oh God, oh God” way that comes from something hitting a little too close to my “school days trauma” bone.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@NotMax: That title is great
Ken
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: What I’ve heard is that you hold the piece of bread in your mouth, between tongue and palate.
I don’t know if it works. If it does, maybe because it keeps you from breathing through your mouth?
Soprano2
Ok, the Covid testing situation here is officially insane. I had a test scheduled this afternoon due to my known exposure. I got a text from them about 30 minutes ago saying they were closing down, and to check the web site for other appointments. Well, all the locations of that place show no appointments for today, tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday. I tried to schedule a drive-thru at Walgreens, no dice. I called my doctor’s office to see if they could help me; when I pressed “zero” for Covid stuff, I got a message and it then hung up! Since I don’t have symptoms I think they can’t help me anyway. I called my boss to tell her I don’t think I can get tested, and that if I couldn’t get one by Sunday there isn’t even a reason to test. She has a contact at the Health Department I’m going to call in a few minutes to see if they can do it. My boss told me she was going to go to a drive-thru that they have twice a week here, but her friend was able to do it first, and when she checked the drive-thru site later there were 100 cars lined up around the block! No store here has any home tests available either. I swear, testing is the one place where I’ve been disappointed by the Biden administration – it should be much better by now.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Totally off-topic except it’s on the general topic of video entertainment: One of my favorite new YouTube rabbit holes is a channel called “Life in the 1800s”. Mostly video from the 1930s, which was an era when apparently (and to our good fortune) people decided to start interviewing and recording first-hand witnesses to the 19th century. Last night I watched a talk by Thomas Watson, the assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, about the invention of the telephone. He included demonstrations of Bell’s apparatus.
A couple of nights ago it was a 19th century photographer who had photographed a lot of the old west and may have invented the picture post card.
zhena gogolia
We’re watching The Pursuit of Love, which is mildly amusing. Great cast headed by Lily James. Andrew Scott is hilarious in it.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: LOL, Killer is his name, thus the capital letter. I can see why you might misinterpret.
WereBear
@Soprano2: Sounds like a rescue!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Soprano2: I don’t know where you are, but apparently everybody has been experiencing this in Florida, and are what you might say slightly peeved at DeSantis for sitting on a million test kits and letting them expire.
Hopefully even the Republican voters will remember that at election time.
NotMax
@Dorothy A. Winsor
Run with it with my blessing.
We can talk (extremely) modest compensation later on, when the movie rights are in negotiation.
;)
Tony Jay
@zhena gogolia:
One the one hand I very much enjoyed it. Andrew Scott is always great and Lily James, well, she’s got it.
On the other hand, I can’t quite put my finger on why (sarcasm alert) but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to discover within myself the ability to watch the travails of the careless rich and well-to-do of Britain with anything other than seething contempt and a golfbag full of harpoons.
JMG
@Betty Cracker: Coach was a mediocre sitcom with excellent comic actors in the main roles. Friday Night Lights had an excellent first season but couldn’t sustain it. I should have noted it as an exception. By and large, sports movies are not much better than TV shows when they do team sports. Boxing movies can be excellent. The only team sports movie I think of as super is Slap Shot.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
8-)
Victor Matheson
@cope: As a soccer referee for 35 years including a cup of coffee in MLS and over 500 D1 college games, I am wildly predisposed to like this show as long as they didn’t screw up the soccer. And they didn’t. While the soccer scenes are not really EPL (or even MLS) quality, they do a good enough job with accurately capturing the essence of the sport that it isn’t a distraction, and they can let the rest of the story-telling and character development carry the show.
Victor Matheson
@cope: As a soccer referee for 35 years including a cup of coffee in MLS and over 500 D1 college games, I am wildly predisposed to like this show as long as they didn’t screw up the soccer. And they didn’t. While the soccer scenes are not really EPL (or even MLS) quality, they do a good enough job with accurately capturing the essence of the sport that it isn’t a distraction, and they can let the rest of the story-telling and character development carry the show.
Victor Matheson
@JMG: Friday Night Lights? Haven’t really watched it carefully, but pretty rave reviews.
geg6
@MisterDancer:
Not quite. The back story with a quote from Gabaldon herself:
So definitely not fanfic, but simply a chance glance of a Dr. Who episode set during the Jacobite risings by an academic tired of writing academic dissertations on zoology and marine biology and behavioral ecology and technical articles on computer science and looking for a time and place to set a historical novel she wanted to write in her spare time.
And yes, I’m a big fan of her books and the series. I despise Dr. Who though.
Victor Matheson
@Betty Cracker: White Shadow? But that’s really dating my age.
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: Jesus, what a pain in the ass. Hope you can get some answers soon.
geg6
@Miss Bianca:
Freaks and Geeks is awesome (how about that cast!?!?!?!?!). It’s a travesty that it only lasted one season. Watched in real time and was devastated when it was cancelled.
narya
@MisterDancer: I kinda disagree with that critique, tbh. (I love me some Roy Kent, and HIS character’s evolution is very interesting in so very many ways.) I really don’t see Ted as a “dad” character in the way that critique does, even though he is in fact a father. Roy’s coaching of the girls’ soccer team is awesome, for example. And even Jamie’s character evolves. In S2, one character is displaying their true colors in ways I hate–punching down always upsets me–and I will be interested to see what they do with that. Also amused to learn that the person who plays Rebecca can actually sing.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: I wouldn’t say there was zero connection between Black Sails and Treasure Island. In the beginning, it seems tangential, but as it goes on, the piquancy of the story for me is all about how it’s related to Treasure Island. You can see the groundwork being laid for TI’s story. And the fact that the engaging, naively huckstering John Silver we see in Black Sails doesn’t seem in any way likely to become Stevenson’s Long John Silver was what kept pulling me forward. (They do it for me, btw – they make me believe in that character’s arc.)
Betty Cracker
@JMG: A League of Their Own, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, The Natural.
Old School
@JMG: Does Cobra Kai count as a sports show?
Ken T.
Such a sweet pup! Always brings a smile. Thanks for sharing! A friend in Evinston (county line area for Alachua and Levy counties) had a gator in one of his ponds grab a coyote last week. Watch those hounds when they are near the water! I am quite sure you do. Cheers.
geg6
@geg6:
Total blockquote fail. Last two paragraphs are me. Ugh.
Ruviana
@Ken: That seems more likely. I’ve heard similar stories about holding a toothpick or a needle in your mouth while peeling onions.
Miss Bianca
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
It’s not nearly as visually interesting a solution, but my mother always insisted on refrigerating onions as a way to combat the fumes. I don’t know how much it actually helps, but I’ve always refrigerated my onions as a result.
cope
@Victor Matheson: I agree that they do a pretty good job of not screwing up the soccer bits and what they do offer up is certainly not the game at its highest level of play. But it works for the purposes of the show.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
The exact ones I was going to rattle off.
ETA: I would add Brian’s Song.
Victor Matheson
@JMG: Really, you are not on board with any of the baseball movies – 42, Eight men out, the Natural , Major League (a guilty pleasure of mine up there with Slap Shot), Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, A League of their Own, Moneyball, even the Bad News Bears.
Jerry McGuire in football or the Burt Reynold prison football movie. Miracle is a pretty good hockey movie as well. Hoop Dreams pretty spectacular (although a documentary).
And I love Victory in soccer (although it is totally ridiculous) plus Bend it Like Beckham.
RobertB
@MisterDancer: If Outlander is Dr. Who with the serial numbers filed off, then I might have to watch Dr. Who for the ‘adult content’.
NotMax
@geg6
Square Pegs, also too. Both highly of its time and timeless.
;)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JMG: FNL went a bit off the rails in to Teen Soap land in the second or third season, but as I recall they brought it back on track. But you have to suspend all kinds of disbelief to follow Tammy’s career path to the end of the show.
sheila in nc
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’m with you. Literature without conflict is pablum, but watching main characters destroy themselves is really hard. About 40 years ago I worked through most of Herman Wouk’s oeuvre and I seemed to spend a lot of time telling the protagonist, “Oh man, don’t do that!!” (but they never listened)
Miss Bianca
@NotMax:
Ooh, ooh! And then can we have The Swashbunglers as its sequel, when the kids go to sea and the requisite Hilarity ensues?
geg6
@RobertB:
Don’t. They have nothing in common other than time travel.
zhena gogolia
@Tony Jay: True. I hate myself for devouring this stuff.
geg6
@NotMax:
Yes! Another gem that was criminally cancelled!
zhena gogolia
@geg6: Bang the Drum Slowly.
Miss Bianca
@geg6: Wondering if there’s any other one-season show that launched so many careers as Freaks and Geeks. I kept going “OMG!” on first watching as the opening credits launched .
RobertB
@sheila in nc: We would need our resident authors to chime in, but making the characters you like do totally stupid things is a winning formula for drama. Game of Thrones (book and series) is one chapter/scene after the other of this, at least the first few books/seasons are.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I totally agree, and in some cases it’s even worse. Like CBS taking shows that are on-the-air with cable, and moving the current episodes to their “Peacock” streaming services.
So I’m paying for cable AND if I want to continue to watch a show I have watched for years on cable, i have to pay for that streaming service, too. It’s maddening.
This middle ground is the worst of both worlds.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
The Hustler?
While on the subject, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire. Best musical vampire billiards movie ever. Really.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Peacock is NBC. CBS is Paramount+.
Betty Cracker
@WaterGirl: That’s by design, I reckon. Seems like the networks are trying to squeeze every penny out of us until the crumbling sports dam that is keeping them profitable collapses and the TV marketplace becomes a streaming app free-for-all. I’m confident they’ll figure out a new way to screw us when that happens.
WaterGirl
@geg6: All fixed, if I interpreted “last 2 paragraphs” correctly.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Great list.
NotMax
@NotMax
Correction.
Best musical vampire snooker movie ever. Really.
(Memory. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.)
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Yes, yes, and yes.
Your last sentence got a audible chuckle from me, but then the absolute truth and inevitability of exactly that happening washed over me and brought the chuckle to an abrupt end.
Soprano2
@WereBear: They were both “foundlings”, as in “they found our front porch a good place to hang out because it had food, water, and a warm place to sleep”. LOL Most of our cats are like that – our indoor cat, Eliot, was a mother cat who was abandoned by her people who lived across the street when she had 4 kittens. We’ve only sought out pets a few times in our lives. The last dog we adopted is a 12-year-old Lab mix who belonged to a cook we had at our pub who died suddenly from a heart attack.
Soprano2
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: What surprised me was that I had an appointment scheduled for this afternoon, and then they texted me to say they were closing down. My boss’ contact at the health department came through – I should know by 3:00 this afternoon. It was a throat swab, which is the first time I’ve had that type of test. Crossing my fingers for a negative result.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I tried to sign up for the CBS streaming service to watch the Whoopi Goldberg version of The Stand, but there was some glitch in the system and nobody could sign up. I forgot about it for a while, and when I thought about it again I realized I had not seen one mention of the show on-line, not good or bad. Nobody was hate-watching or even one tweet saying it was Meh. For something with that kind of profile to pass completely unnoticed is strange, given the way we live now.
cope
@Betty Cracker: Cable TV is on the way out and the next iteration of how we watch is being hammered out but, yes, we’re certain of being screwed one way or another.
geg6
@WaterGirl:
Perfect. Thanks!
catclub
@WaterGirl: This is yet another case/variation of “Big corporations thrive in the internet because people don’t care to run their own website server and mailserver.” Sendmail file parsing! Fun!
NotMax
@cope
Sooner or later all streaming services will be owned or co-owned by Disney.
//
Chris
@NotMax:
Well, if that means I only have to pay for one subscription…
(Of course, it probably means that subscription will cost more than all the current subscriptions packed together. Hello again, piracy!)
NotMax
@Chris
The Mouse is a harsh mistress.
Or something.
//
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: FWIW, I thought it was terrible and quit one or two episodes in, and I loved the book as a kid, and my quality standards aren’t all that high.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: It is recreating cable, only without Fox News.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Hey (guilty admission), I watched My Mother, the Car.
{Any Ann Sothern is better than none.)
:)
RobertB
@Betty Cracker: I have Stephen King’s unexpurgated version of The Stand. Putting those edits back didn’t help it much.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: yeah, probably just as well I was spared an attempt to revisit something I loved when I was 12. I would think there’s the stuff of some good rewrites in King’s work, though the last time I picked up one of his books was some twenty-five years ago, and I didn’t hate it, but I rolled my eyes a lot
cope
@NotMax: Compared to The Mouse, Mark Zuckerberg looks like Albert Schweitzer.
Victor Matheson
@Betty Cracker: I totally independently listed all of those great baseball movies (as well as a few more).
Mind you, the fact that you are thinking like me is not necessarily a compliment (for a normal person, at least.)
gvg
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
It’s putting a piece of bread in your moth that controls onions effects. And it does help. Also I didn’t hear that as specifically Mexican, just in general. I may have heard it from a high school friends Italian mom.
NotMaxn
@Victor Matheson
Would also add to the already copious listings The Basket.
NotMax
@RobertB
Stephen King is an acquired distaste.
Tinare
@JMG: Does Sports Night count as a sports tv show?
RobertB
@NotMax: The Tommyknockers broke me of Stephen King.
scuffletuffle
@zhena gogolia: The book is much, much funnier, though I did enjoy the miniseries.
TheronWare
Happy happy pup!
Ruckus
@Baud:
It isn’t like that, IT IS THAT.
I had Apple TV for a bit, it’s very well done, except. You pay up front, you pay for everything along the way. The product quality is good, but unlike hardware, you have to keep paying and paying and paying. It does lose some of the appeal. Or maybe, all of it.
Ruckus
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Bad things happen because we are animals. Because we are alive. Because 99.9% of us have flaws. (And it’s the other .1% that we despise because they have no obvious flaws.) Because we can’t see into the future, no matter how hard we try. Because we can’t remember the past because of shame or memory. Life repeats because we are almost all living beings, with faults big and small. Life is also interesting because we are almost all living beings, with faults big and small.
texasdoc
@Dorothy A. Winsor: This reminds me of something a travel writer once said–that you remember the trips where something went wrong much more than the ones where everything went according to plan. In my case, the story I tell most often is about a trip to Costa Rica for a summer program. The flight had a stop in Mexico City, scheduled to be long enough that they let those of us through-passengers who wanted to, get off the plane to stretch our legs. What they neglected to tell us, was that they wouldn’t announce it on the overhead if they left (as they did) 15 minutes before scheduled. As a result, my seatmates and I ended up as “illegal immigrants” to Mexico. The airline put us up in a hotel in Mexico City overnight, where (for the first and only time in my life) I had room service because my dressy clothes were on the plane and casual clothes were not allowed in the dining room. We were put on a LACSA (Costa Rican airlines) plane the next morning. That would have been great if I were a drinker, as the rum and other liquor were all free.
StringOnAStick
@Miss Bianca: Refrigerating onions definitely works at keeping the eye-burning fumes down! I’ve done personal testing on this and I am positive it works, to the point where all onions go immediately into either the cool room for longer storage, and from there into the refrigerator for a minimum of 4 hours before use. If I only have a few onions on hand, they are in the refrigerator as soon as I unpack the groceries.
JML
I’m loving ted lasso (I have a free 3 month trial on Apple TV and I’m using it to get through Ted Lasso, Foundation, and For All Mankind), especially Roy Kent who is my favorite profane and grouchy bastard. I really didn’t think I was going to like it, but it’s just weird and self-aware enough that I’m in.
I think most sports shows end up not being much about the sport itself, in part because they struggle to show game action, no matter the sport. shooting game action is a specialized skill anyways, but trying to simulate it with actors who are not athletes is really tough. You frequently get guys who are supposed to be elite basketball players who can’t play a lick and it shows. (there’s a reason wesley snipes is almost always shown in slo-motion in Major League: he’s actually really slow and terrible at baseball.)
J R in WV
@Betty Cracker:
It is actually a 7 volume series, if you count the prequels and sequels. Started with 3 novels IIRC, it was a V long time ago I last read them.
I lost a lot of respect for Dr. Asimov when I learned he was very free with his hands with female members of the SciFi community. A shame, he was a good and creative writer… just a shitty person.
SFAW
Re: Ted Lasso: maybe I’m just weird, but I think Brett Goldstein must have had (or be having) a blast as Roy Kent. For some reason, the clip of him walking past reporters, saying “No …. no … fuck off … no … fuck off” whilst flipping them the (Brit version of the) bird is wicked pissah.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
As I said a few weeks ago, the plot line departs significantly from the alleged source material, and if they hadn’t called it “Foundation,” I’d probably be more accepting. Still trying to decide if I can turn that part of my brain off. [I also got mildly annoyed that Peter Jackson had the whole Arwen-saves-Frodo-from-the-Nine, Aragorn-has-to-re-forge-Anduril/Narsil-to-keep-Arwen-from-dying bullshit as a thing, but I realize Liv Tyler’s pouty lips are always an important story point, so I overcame my objections.]
Ramalama
@sheila in nc: Wouk”s Winds of War series on … video? was pretty awesome. The follow-up to WWIi and the early days was an interesting perspective: one American family has three men go off in different branches to serve. The sequel though was something I wish I hadn’t watched.
Ramalama
@sheila in nc: but I never read any Herman Wouk. Just saw the series offered by a library, back when we cut off paying for cable. Hahaha now we stream and pay for everything. Suckers!