Monday, May 05, 2025

Monday, Monday

 What's Up!


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12 comments:

Jerry House said...

Hope you are living your best va-cay life, Patti.

It's been a complicated week. Not much is happening with me physically, but emotionally I am becoming a wreck because of what's happening politically. The AI-generated image of Pope Donald was the icing on the cake, along with J.F. sloughing it off as a joke. I need a mental reset.

A medical check-up this weeks shows that I am extremely healthy despite what my body is trying to tell me. and I now have a doctor's note to prove it.

We had our last art class Tuesday. Again, the instructor was useless. She asked if we wanted to extend the class to eight weeks instead of five -- something we quickly rebuffed; probably half the class had dropped out. This week's assignment was paint-whatever-the-hell-you-want. I opted to draw a portrait of a woman. In my mind she would be fey, ethereal, otherworldly...in reality she turned out to be gross, distorted, and a zombie-like diseased-ridden ghoul. **sigh** I am not cut out to be an artist. On the bright side of things, we stopped at a good Chinese restaurant on the way to class.

This weekend, the girls had their first camping trip of 2025, where they watched explored a cave and watched bats come out at night. Very heavy thunderstorms did not dampen their enthusiasm and they made special quesadillas on Saturday night.

My computer has been giving me grief all week. It died temporarily early on so i was unable to comment on your blog last time. Then it came back and began eating a bunch of stuff I had written and did not allow me to retrieve it. Then it died more than temporarily; after three days, my tech guy managed to say an incantation. cursed,, then said a few more incantations, and .. voila!...it lived again! I have been told that it has perhaps another five or six months before it takes a final and lasting dirt nap. (Grrr, mutters the technical Luddite.)

With the computer out and since I caught up with DAREDEVIL last week, I decided to go back and catch a few of the Marvel Studios television shows I had missed. SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY-AT-LAW was cute in a let's-break-the-fourth-wall kind of way. SECRET INVASION put a coda on the Nick Fury saga. THE INHUMANS was a soap opera-ish take on castle intrigue among a royal family of mutants. I'm halfway through the second season of LOKI, which brings even more chaos and confusion to Marvel's Stage 5.

Not much reading this week. THE SPPIDER: CITY OF DOOM by Norvell Page is an omnibus of three Spider pulp novels originally published as by 'Grant Stockbridge" : THE CITY DESTROPYER, THE FACELESS ONE, and THE COUNCIL OF EVIL. IMHO the Spider out-thrills both Doc Savage and The Shadow. The pace is unrelenting, the bad guys are truly evil, and the body count is astounding. I also read Mickey Spillane's THE DELTA FACTOR, which was to have started a series about Morgan the Raider, but Spillane abandoned the series after seeing the mess they made of the movie based on this one. I still admire Spillane's writing but I can only take a little of him at a time. The horror anthology THE CURSE OF THE DEAD supposedly covers the vampire theme from 1791 to 1970, with the majority of the book bringing out old chestnuts from de Sade, Monk Lewis, John Polidari, Poe, Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker before moving on to a fe more contemporary tales. The book ends with a very short original tale by the editor's husband (using a pseudonym) which was apparently his only un-coauthored tale. Nepotism strikes in the original paperback anthology market. Oh, and there are useless appendices of a bibliography and suggested further reading. Mt graphic novel this week was Dennis O'Neil's THE RING, THE ARROW, AND THE BAT, a revisionist take on the first meetings between Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and Batman. Choppy, but workable. Coming up are Stephen Graham Jones' I WAS A TEENEGE SLASHER and Many Wade Wellman's A DOUBLE LIFE (planned for this week's FFB, but, you know, computer...)

Do you really want to come back here after viewing sunny Italy? I hope so, Patti. Stay safe.

6:26 AM
Jeff Meyerson said...

Hope you are enjoying the trip. It is very unlikely we will get back to Europe again, and I'm fine with that. Looking forward to seeing what Jerry & the gang have been up to this week.

Mostly quiet here, with 70s and even two 80+ degree days before it turned cooler and rainy yesterday. Looks like a cool, rainy week ahead for us. Pollen has been very bad, so at least the rain has cleaned the mess off the cars and helped allergy sufferers, which does not include me.

Read a couple of books - WORDHUNTER and KILLERS OF A CERTAIN AGE - and have two short story collections going as usual. Plenty of television, of course. We watched the final REBUS episode (a nasty one) and need a new Brit Night show for next Saturday. We tried the new Masterpiece show, MISS AUSTEN, but neither of us cared for it at all and quit halfway through. I didn't expect it to be for me, but Jackie agreed. I'm sure many people will enjoy it, but I am not one of them.

We finished THE AGENCY, which I did not love. Michael Fassbender was a very cold character. I notice that Jeffrey Wright, who played his boss, turned up in Seattle in THE LAST OF US last night. Still have four French language series going, also DARK WINDS, HACKS, and, of course, THE PITT (four episodes left). Jackie is now watching the second series of an Italian show which seems quite nasty. I know it has MAESTRO in the title. (That, of course, makes me think of "The Maestro" on SEINFELD.)

6:31 AM
Diane Kelley said...

Hope you're enjoying Italy, Patti. Patrick is on a plane flying from Taiwan to New York City. His conference in Japan went well. Diane is busy packing for our trip later this week to NYC. Katie will take the train from Boston to join us for Mother's Day weekend. Plenty of plays and restaurants to enjoy! Stay safe!

10:00 AM
Gerard Saylor said...

All my best wishes for a great trip to Italy. My brother and sister-in-law spent a month or two (or three) there once. She had a work thing. He may have been in his first retirement. I've seen it on TV.
I helped out the Rotary Club post-prom party on Saturday. I got home at about 2.30AM Sunday and was lucky enough to probably fall asleep by 3am. The Sunday after post-prom is always a bust and I complained as much to my wife. She pointed out I still got the lawn mowed and vacuumed the cars.
I gave Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW a try for 1.5 hours out of 34 hours runtime. If the story was really grabbing me I figured I could switch to a print edition when the audiobook checkout expired. The story was OK but I was unable to pay enough attention knowing I did not have time to finish it. So, I quit.
Almost finished with Duane Swierczynski's SECRET DEAD MEN. I checked out a 2024 reprint thinking I'd missed hearing about a new novel. Nope, this one came out in 2005. I enjoy Swierczynski's work but this one has some holes.
Halfway through season 11 of THE WALKING DEAD. Not sure if that show has ended for good and the spin-offs continue. I've not watched much else but have a list of older films in the queue on MAX and been watching pieces of THE LOST PATROL (1934). Plan to watch the Conan O'Brien Mark Twain Prize on whatever service has that.

11:05 AM
TracyK said...

I hope you tell us about your adventures in Florence when you get back, Patti, and I hope that they are all good adventures.

I am looking forward to Mother's Day weekend because Glen and our son will cook for me and I get to pick movies. Back in the 1990's I used to spend the whole weekend watch the NBA Finals but I am not into basketball anymore.

Glen and I have both been feeling off the last week, and I think it is just allergies. Plus Glen still has some lingering tiredness after the tooth extraction.

Most of our watching has been the same shows as usual. We are watching the latest season of THE CHELSEA DETECTIVE and have picked up WILD BILL with Rob Lowe again. We had watched only one episode a while back. It was good; I like the actors. But it is only one season.

I stayed up late last night finishing CHARM SCHOOL by Nelson DeMille and I enjoyed it. Not as good as books by my favorite authors of espionage fiction, but still very good. 750 pages and it took me a week to read it.

This week Glen read a short nonfiction book: WEIRD MEDIEVAL GUYS: HOW TO LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE (AND DIE) IN DARK TIMES by Olivia Swarthout. He liked it and I would like to read it some time. He is still reading LIGHT RAINS SOMETIMES FALL by Lev Parikian.

3:15 PM
Jeff Meyerson said...

Update: I asked Jackie and she said it is MAESTRO IN BLUE. She also said it is very dark.

If you like (as I do) epistolary novels, try Virginia Evans's THE CORRESPONDENT.

3:37 PM
Gerard Saylor said...

Jerry's rec for THE SPIDER: CITY OF DOOM has me interested.

4:19 PM
Todd Mason said...

As with all of us, hope the visit to my grandfather's birth-country (as a decorated immigrant WW1 soldier in the US, who apparently worked hard in WV coal mines in his civilian life, how vividly in my now-late mother's childhood memory he hated Mussolini and presumably he would've had about as little good to say about Drumpf...killed in a suspicious accident in one of the mines he worked in some managerial level, my mother recalled suspecting to allow his then-job to be opened up for others). I might get there. New and interesting (in their nature, not so much the experience) health hassles arising.Am checking out a few older series again (such as THIRD WATCH) in lege-elevation time. As with your other correspondents, Drumpf and his useless idiot corps might contribute on some psychic level, along with trying to kill all the useful agencies and services in the land of the expensive. And our insufficiently spayed younger cat has gone into her worst heat since we've kept her, thus is miserable and shares here voluble misery with the rest of us. Hope things are much more pleasantly interesting over there!

4:05 AM
Todd Mason said...

Leg elevation, as opposed to lege/legislature-elevation, though in some moods a little legislature-motivation to reign in the Puling Infant in Chief might not be a bad idea, before he starts injudiciously having hanged or shot the ones he chooses to dislike.

4:09 AM
Anonymous said...

I am hoping the jet lag is soon gone. I arrived at the airport to find after lunch that my boarding pass was for Hassam Abbid and I was going to Stockholm, why didn’t the TSA guy notice this. So much for security. I know this sounds like Jerry House but it is Hassam . I mean Patti.

5:38 PM
Gerard Saylor said...

I hope you and Hassam have a great trip.

12:27 PM
Todd Mason said...

Nobody said there'd be international espionage. We who lack Real ID miss all the fun.

2:06 AM

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