I am pretty much moved in, but now I have to pack for CA. Sort of exhausting-I always overpack, taking everything that might be needed despite there being a CVS a block away. Have I ever used the bandaids, neosporin, list of passwords, address book, knee braces, multiple sunhats, eye glasses, etc. I take?
Reading COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA-about the making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe. Watching the finale of MONSIEUR SPADE and TRUE DETECTIVE tonight. Enjoying MR and MRS SMITH. Rewatching FREAKS AND GEEKS after listening to a podcast on it. Still watching NORTHERN EXPOSURE, which was such an original show. The third season is terrific.
Watched JIRO-DREAMS OF SUSHI. Jiro was 85 when they made this doc and 15 years later at 100 he is still massaging fish in his restaurant. It looks like good sushi is about the quality of the fish you can get and how long you rub it.
I will post MONDAY, MONDAY for the next three weeks although it will be empty, waiting for you. I will read it on my cellphone but I can never seem to get anything much on there.
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Reading Owning Up a collection of four stories by George Pelecanos and Comparative Anatomy by Stephen Gallegher-a best of collection. A bunch of stuff came in at the library all at once. Includes The Book of Love the first novel by Kelly Link and new novels by Robert Jackson Bennett, Jonathan Kellerman and Thomas Mullen. I might have to pass on the Kelly Link, it's a doorstop.
Watching Bill Maher, John Oliver, Curb Your Enthusiasm, True Detective and Monsieur Spade. Shogun starting on FX this week looks good. No movies this week.
Weather has been cold although it suppossed to be warming up.
May have to give up my car. It is just too big a chunk of my income. Although I would have to figure out rides. I won' use Uber since they stranded me the only time I used them. I called them for a pick up from my Doctor and was told they had no one in my area. Had to wait three hours for a ride.
Enjoy California. It will be a good and relaxing change of pace from Michigan.
After the unseaonably cold weather here on the Florida Panhandle, I'd be tempted to head out to California for a vacay myself. Walt usually heads off on Saturdays at 0-dark-hundred to do some nature photography in the more remote places around here; not this week -- too darned cold; he headed back to bed. Christina has been using a portable heater in her bedroom. I just sit around and bitch about it being too cold to go to the beach.
What's been happening this week? Not much. As you know, we lost Sprout, the five-year-old cat. From the first signof a problem to being told there was no hope and she had to be euthanized was 45 minutes. Never knew cats could suffer from sudden massive heart attacks.
Christina is still trying to bake at least one thing every week. This week it was ginger snaps. They were yummy.
Watched THE MARVELS, an over-long, over-complicated CGI-laden film based on the comic book characters. Parts were cute but I fear the MCU had wandered far afield. Also binged on BEYOND PARADISE, which I enjoyed so much I've gone back to DEATH IN PARADISE and picked up where I had left off in Season 7. It's "impossible" mysteries and "locked room" murders are usually easy to figure out, but the characters and the location are pleasing. I'll probably binge this one through the current Season 13.
It was a light reading week. Two Roger West novels by John Creasey: THE EXTORTIONERS and INSPECTOR WEST ALONE; Ken Crossen's first pulp novel about the Green Lama, THE CASE OF THE CRIMSON HAND; and two by Lawrence Block, the Scudder novella A TIME TO SCATTER STONES and his collection of introductions, appreciations, and reminences of various crime writers, THE DRIME OF OUR LIVES. Garphic novels read were Gerry Dugan's BATMAN: ONE FIN DAY: MT. FREEZE and Ryan North's WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FANTASTIC FOUR? Currently reading the updated edition of Block's GENERALLY SPEAKING, a collection of columns about stamps -- something that is no really in my wheelhouse, but Block makes it interesting. Still dipping into James Lee Burke's latest collection. On the bedside table are a few more Creaseys and some library books by Parnell Hall and Martin Edwards.
I'm old enough to remember getting TWO days off from scholl in February -- one for Lincoln's birthday and one for Washington's birthday. Kids nowadays only get today off, the poor little mites.
Hope you have a great President's Day (don't get suckered into buying a mattress or a new car, or whatever they are hawking these days) and a fantastic week. Catch some Calikfornia rays and stay safe.
Oh, I loved Northern Exposure, Patti. Glad to hear you're enjoying it, too. And it's good to hear you're settled into your new place.
I am totally with you on packing for a trip. We almost always forget something, though this year I think we didn't for the first time I can remember. Yes, we have boxes and boxes of Band-Aids that Jackie has bought over the years. In the past she's forgotten: a shower cap, a cane (just in case), knee and wrist braces, Band-Aids, you name it. Once we forgot a phone charger in a hotel and had to replace it. I remember driving around one year down here so she could find a big enough shower cap. Because we are here almost three months, she brings a LOT more stuff - towels, pillows, etc. We get most of our prescriptions filled at Costco, so we are able to refill them at a Costco here.
For some reason, there was a problem with Acorn last night and they wouldn't let us watch MONSIEUR SPADE. Maybe tonight. Still on THE WOMAN IN THE WALL - one more to go. We finished FUNNY WOMAN. Finished the first series of NO OFFENCE. Finished ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL last night. We finished the first season of NORTHERN EXPOSURE, which was only 8 episodes run in the summer of 1990. It's funny to me what I remember and what I don't. Remembered Adam and Chris's brother Bernard but not a lot of the other stuff.
We started watching THE TOURIST on Netflix (originally on MAX, I think) before series two starts February 29. A man (Jamie Dornan) is driving through the Australian outback when he is chased (DUEL-style) and eventually crashed into by a huge truck. He wakes up in the hospital and has total amnesia - doesn't remember who he is, what he is doing there, what happened, etc. Great premise and so far, we're really enjoying it.
Watching series one of SCOTT & BAILEY again. As with NORTHERN EXPOSURE, I remember some of it - her affair and pregnancy, etc. - but don't remember most of the cases. Watching 3 (90 minutes each) European crime shows - THE LAKESIDE MURDERS (Finland), THE WAGNER METHOD, MURDER OF CROWS. Almost done with series 3 of ASTRID.
We met my cousins for lunch for the first time since we've been down here - they have a way busier social calendar than we do. They live on Long Island and are down here for the winter too - they own an apartment in Delray Beach and stay through APril. Went to Texas sw Brazil, where the servers come around with huge hunks of meats and you eat all you want (or can). Flank steak, top sirloin, leg of lamp, Brazilian sausages, parmesan-crusted chicken, parmmesan pork loin - no wonder we only allow ourselves to eat there once a month!
Reading Jeffrey Siger's newest Greek mystery, AT ANY COST, and short stories by Allegra Goodman and Otessa Moshfegh, whose stories are way, way out there. WHat a mind.
It's still been mostly cool (for Florida) here, though we had one 80 degree day. We also had heavy rain all day yesterday.
Have a great trip, Patti. You can always buy anything you forget. Just remember the chargers and the Kindle.
Steve-you need to have the Lyft app too. Also could you downsize to a less expensive car. As someone you doesn't drive I can tell you it's no fun. I depend of SHIPT for my groceries and get rides through the senior center and from Smart Connector buses. The Smart buses are only $1.00 and pick you up right at your place. I think you are limited to places with ten miles. Also I really lean heavily on friends. If you stay home most of the time, you can probably manage. But I hate to stay home.
Jerry-California is having horrible weather. You might want to go elsewhere. For years we would count on almost no rain and no cold temps. But not the last two years.
THanks, Margot.
Diane and I landed in snowy Buffalo last night after attending a weekend wedding in Georgia. The wedding venue was 45 miles from the Atlanta airport so Diane had Katie teach her how to summon an Uber. Diane is a good student and we had no trouble getting from our hotel to the wedding reception and yesterday getting from our hotel back to the Atlanta airport. We're glad to be home.
Western NY had no snow on the ground when we left for Georgia on Friday but there was 5 inches of the White Stuff on the ground when we landed last night. I'll fire up Big Orange and snow blow my driveway after breakfast.
Have a great trip! Stay safe!
Typical. I did a second post, didn't save it, and it's gone.
Oh well, just wanted to correct it to Texas DE Brazil.
And to tell you to skip QUEEN BEES despite the good cast.
I live in fear that my ancient Kindle will die. But there is an excellent library with a great selection of books for sale around the corner. I guess all the vacationers leave their books although I hate to read hardbacks now. Looking forward to THE TOURIST if we can put our codes into the TV and get it. Last year, we were able to. Just looking at Jamie Dornan is enough for three old ladies.
Patti, we were supposed to see the touring company version of FUNNY GIRL this past weekend but we were in Georgia for a wedding. We gave the FUNNY GIRL tickets to friends and after the snow, Diane got a blizzard of text messages about how great the performance was. Katerina McCrimmon is a rising star. If this touring company shows up in your neighborhood, I'm sure you would enjoy it!!
Thanks, George. I will look out for it. I have tkts for SUNSET BOULEVARD in June. But a local company so it will be a small production.
Patti, they seem to be making it easier now. I used to have to type in my email address, then the Netflix password. Now they just send me a 4 digit code to my phone and you type it in and it goes on.
As for FUNNY GIRL, we waited until Beanie Feldstein left and Lea Michelle came in, and she was terrific.
Do you contact Netflix to get the code, Jeff?
It had Netflix on the television. When I went to it, it went to the screen that told you what to do.
With Amazon, they told me to go to Amazon. Com/ whatever and there they gave you a code to enter on the phone, I think. That turned it on.
Thx!
Lots of rain here this weekend. The weather still shows flash flood warnings for the county but the forecast only looks like maybe some rain in Goleta this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon.
We are still watching MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD. It is creepy but keeping us interested. We are in the second season of NORTHERN EXPOSURE and in the last season of STAR TREK: VOYAGER. Also watched the latest episode of DEATH IN PARADISE. Still watching DEATH AND OTHER DETAILS but wish we did not have to wait so long for a new episode. We watched MINISTRY OF FEAR on Criterion. Glen thought it was kind of a mess. I liked it but it was about spies so I liked it. Now I want to read the novel by Graham Greened.
I read two books this week. One was GALLOWS COURT, the first Rachel Savernake book by Martin Edwards. It was not what I expected. It is set in 1930s London and is more a thriller than a puzzle mystery. I liked the way it ended and I thought it was a brilliant mystery, but I wasn't really enjoying it too much as I read it. I also wonder where the next book will go with the main character, so I will definitely be reading it, maybe later in the year.
I just finished A MAN CALLED OVE last night, or actually in the early hours of the morning. I loved it. I cried through half of it and a lot of it was funny. Patti, I thought you were the one that recommended this to me, as a book about someone who has problems relating to others, is socially awkward. Did you read it?
Speaking of Graham Greene, I started reading THE QUIET AMERICAN on the Kindle. I have to get used to reading something from that every day, during the day.
Glen finished A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST by Rebecca Solnit. He liked some of the essays, others not so much. He has passed it on to me and I will try some of the essays, because I have never read anything else by her.
Now he is reading AGENT ZIGZAG by Ben MacIntyre. The subtitle is "A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal." He is liking it. I will read it too someday.
Yes, I liked A MAN CALLED OVE a lot. And liked the original version of the film especially. The actor was exactly as I pictured him. Have you seen THE THIRD MAN, also by Greene. Not sure if that is still on Criterion or not but that is my favorite spy-ish film. Such atmosphere and music. Glen might like COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA.
So many people have recommended AGENT ZIGZAG to me, I must try it.
Hoping that rain lets us before we arrive on Saturday.
Love, love, love THE THIRD MAN. Great music. And we saw so many of the real places they filmed in Vienna, including the Prater, of course.
We were only in Vienna for three or four days and I only remember eating pastry.
Yes, we have seen The Third Man. It has been a while though, so we should watch it again soon. I have never read the book.
I agree, Glen might like COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA. Maybe I would too, but more his kind of thing.
I do hope that you don't have lots of rain when you come to California. It does look like Southern California may have rain next weekend, but then maybe not after that.
Jerry, very sorry to hear about Sprout. I had never heard of a cat having a heart attack.
Jackie loved the ice cream there too - Vienna, that is -but yes, pastry. Sacher torte, Black Forest gateau (Schwarzwalder kirschtorte), yum.
A very beautiful city.
Yes, as the song doesn't quite go, "Atmospheric River, stay away from my vacation home door..." Good luck with the weather this time.
As I wrote on your Scout post, Jerry, our littlest cat so far, Emmy/Emma, died of a congenital heart problem that resulted in a massive, for her, heart attack. It was a frightening sort of thing to see. She had a tough life before Alice and her colleagues at her first clinic rescued a small cohort of street cats. Em was the one we took. It's not fun, no, and mostly for them, when it comes for them...the closest I've come to the kind of scare I gave my parents a few times in my earliest years. Hope everyone in your orbit stays healthier for quite some time, Jerry (and everyone).
Well, inasmuch as Verizon seems to want to get out of the cable business, it's not too surprising they mistagged last week's episode of THE WOMAN IN THE WALL as the finale, and didn't tag this week's episode of M. SPADE as the finale. Still enjoying them, though a playbook to keep all the agents in SPADE straight from week to week would be useful. Not sure if we were to take the trans Brit woman spy as trans or not. Glad to see THE DAILY SHOW and LAST WEEK TONIGHT return. And Trumple remains a source of bad laughs.
Having discovered that the 2007 time-travel fantasy series JOURNEYMAN is up on Archive.org, I've been enjoying that over the last couple of days. Haven't seen it since the 13 episodes had their first run. When I ferret out the episodes of the BBC/NTA Film Network series THE THIN MAN (pretty loosely adapted from the novel/film) with Michael Rennie as the star, I give them a look.
I wondered that too about the mother/spy. You sure find some interesting shows.
https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Journeyman%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%222007%22 to see JOURNEYMAN episodes (NBC)...it and the not altogether dissimilarly clever, but younger-pitched THE MIDDLEMAN (ABC Family) had the misfortune to be up against the ridiculously popular CSI: MIAMI, on Mondays at 10pm ET/PT, and neither flourished as a result.
Alas, TRUE DETECTIVE defaulted to the series's tendency to Mostly Scooby-Doo/rationalized magical realism, only still playing it both ways at the very end.
I'm always happy to see Alfre Woodard pop up just about anywhere, including the finale of M. SPADE...long-term "media crush"...
JOURNEYMAN was producer/creator Kevin Falls's next project after SPORTS NIGHT and THE WEST WING.
The series deals with the protagonist (Kevin McKidd) becoming (a la Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim) one of small number of involuntary intermittent time-travelers, Unstuck In Time, but usually returning (in this case) to their regular lives for most of their time. One of the other people so afflicted is his mysteriously "dead" ex (Moon Bloodgood). They only are able to get out of a recurring set of "jumps" by helping the people in the past they keep running into escape some sort of dire fate. Karmic Unstuckness.
Bloodgood had just previously been in a not-dissimilar, almost as good, ABC series, DAY BREAK.
We were finally able to get the MONSIEUR SPADE finale last night after 8. It was so odd to see Alfre Woodard out of nowhere, and Todd's right - you needed a scorecard to keep everyone straight. If "she" was working with her "son" for MI-6...she killed him because he preferred women to men?
Still haven't seen it. Again I would follow these plots better if I binged. Maybe younger brains have less trouble though. And for me since I use closed captions the translation on top of the closed captions made many sequences tough. And it drives me crazy when there is music and they have music signs obscuring the captions.
The better captioning moves out of the way of the subtitles. Weird that they do a better job of that on AMC Cable than on what you might be seeing. Older hands at it, perhaps. (My tinnitus is certainly acting up of late.)
I think that, whatever we take away from it, she thought of herself as a woman, and didn't have much in the way of desire for her ?colleague, whom she thought was gay. She shoots him (spoiler) for collaborating with his lover.
The combo of week to week and the Sunday-night stacking of interesting series didn't help with complexities and nuances.
Late as always, but did want to say that I am glad you got moved, and safe travels.
For those dealing with the cold--- I live in NE Dallas. Last week we had hornets and crane flies. That happens now and then when things warm up. But, what really got me was the fact that we had June bugs on our porch Thursday and Friday. Those things never showed up until June when I was a kid. Then it was May. Then it was April. Then late March. Now mid February?
Good grief. We might be done with winter here and if we are, the rest of you won't be far behind.
Late entry. Heard another of Ruth Downie's mysteries set in Ancient Rome with a doctor. The now former Legion doctor is out of the Army, out of Britannia, and living in Rome with his wife and new daughter. An enjoyable series. The way different slaves were treated and valued always shocks me.
Continuing to watch BLACKLIST. I have decided that the show is set in an alternate reality with different ways of doing things, therefore I don't have to get aggravated avoid the absurdities. Always watching Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert. Sometimes watching Jimmy Kimmel. Never watching Bill Maher. I really dislike Maher.
Was able to visit my mother in IL over the weekend. I actually got done with everything that needed doing and was able to do some cleaning. Ate at a small Mexican place in Urbana that was pretty good. Boy #1 University Run Club has a indoor track meet in Champaign this weekend and I had planned to drive down again. But, the track meet is on Saturday which is the same day that Boy #2 has at least four performances at the Solo and Ensemble Festival for music. He has 3-4 solos and at least one ensemble group.
Have book three by DDC Morgan, ROPE AND CANVAS. Post-WWII infantryman taking on different security jobs and solving murders. Looking forward to reading it.
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