What I watched: Yesterday in DOT, SplinterRip said “…clearly I need to up my intake of pre-cluster-fuck police procedurals”. Ha! Have I got a show for you, New Tricks, a BBC comedy/crime/drama show that ran from 2003 to 2015. I am guessing that, considering how long it ran in the UK, most folks there have caught at least one episode ? But it is new to me, and currently airing on Amazon.
The premise is that a lady superintendent shoots a dog during a raid and is subsequently booted from the fast-track to the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad, staffed by three previously retired police officers. She is the professional “new policing” character, while the other three occupy the roles of old-school policing elder statesman, quirky savant, and aging playboy. It is cute and funny and rather Midsomer Murders-esque.
Each show is an hour long, and it is easy, escapist fare with a happy ending. Should you watch this? Absolutely!
What I read: More escapist literature, crime fighter/police procedurals, Conspiracy Theory: A Quincy Harker Demon Hunter series book number seven by John G Hartness, and the Bethany Black Supernatural Thriller Box Set (Books 1 – 3) by John Logsdon, from his Paranormal Police Department world. Quincy is a descendant of Jonathan Harker of Bram Stoker’s Dracula fame. Bethany is one of the world’s only two remaining weretigers, now working for the New York PPD.
Should you read these books? Sure, they are fun and easy and will take your mind off of current events.
What I listened to this week:
Eating Out, That’s My Man
DJ Vadim, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Midnight Marauders
Fontaines DC, I Was Not Born
So, dearest DeadSplinterites, how are you doing? Surviving the chaos? Did you watch, read, or listen to anything good (or bad)? Please tell us how you are doing, and what content you are imbibing!
Watched: From the Earth to the Moon series. My oldest stepdaughter loaned us a literal shopping back full of DVDs because she would rather watch what she already paid for by paying again for three streaming services. Anyway, it’s a very good series and I highly recommend it.
Read: On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides. The story of the Chosin Reservoir clusterfuck. Sides is probably my favorite non-fiction author.
Listened: Did a bit of Albert Collins this past week.
That sounds like good time music to me!
watching : kipo season 3
cheers for recomending it hannibal….its been a little ray of sunshine for me
reading….still on the lost fleet..
and listening…welp..lately ive been on a bit of a local edm kick
Season 3 is out ? It’s cold and overcast here. I’m excited to spend the day watching it!
Thank you, and please keep those local tunes coming!
oh no worries there 🙂
really…shutting me up is the harder job
shes swedish south african tho….i figure thats basically dutch
*keeps going*
fuckit…might as well go for something bouncy too
have i mentioned the party squad recently?
coz….party squad
one more?
i just like her voice
LOVE “New Tricks.”
My phone is on its last legs, Santa has hinted that I might find a new one in my Christmas stocking this year, so I dug out my copy of John Hooper’s The Italians. It’s a very incisive and almost encyclopedic (despite its fairly short length) look at why Italians are the way they are. It’s very affectionate, there’s a lot to admire about Italy and the Italians, God knows we used to go often enough and we know plenty of native-born Italians, but he doesn’t pull any punches. Hooper was, maybe still is, the Rome correspondent for “The Economist.” I won’t give you a book report but I have run some of his ideas by these native Italians and they’ve all said something like, “You know, that’s true, but I never thought about that…”
I wonder if a non-American has done something similar for us since Alexis de Tocqueville in 1830. I read plenty of foreign media and American news looms so large in all of it but it’s mostly what, not why. Hooper, for example, in just three or four pages explains Italians’ obsession with soccer, its origins as…I’m not going to go on. But what if an Italian, in three or four pages, could explain to me Americans’ obsession with football? And college football? The Big Ten? I’ve never understood this and I’ve lived here my entire life, the child of American-born parents. I once went to a Super Bowl party (I went for the drinking and the half-time shows and ads) and no local team was playing. I made a slightly disparaging joke about some scandal I had somehow heard about involving one of the team’s members, thinking I was on safe ground, and it was like I had dipped a cross in urine, a la Andres Serrano all those decades ago.
I would totally read a book about Americans by non Americans. I’m sure it would be very insightful.
Oh CousinMatthew, football is akin to religion, thalt shalt not commit blasphemy.
…there’s a quote attributed to a guy called Bill Shankly who played the other sort of football (the one that some people consider “real” football & others refer to as soccer) for Liverpool back in the day which goes further
A lot of sports seem to be and I don’t really get it. Soccer/football. I was in London years ago and Chelsea had won something. Lots of Chelsea merch. I lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan at the time and I wanted to buy a T-shirt that would be kind of fun and not a schlocky I Heart New York thing to wear around the neighborhood. The seller told me not to, because even in New York I’d be subjected to abuse.
At one of my parties a friend brought a friend who was telling me that she was from eastern Connecticut and was finding the adjustment to western Connecticut (so the NYC metro area) difficult because she was a die-hard Red Sox fan living in Yankees territory. “You’re joking. How often does it come up?” Constantly, according to her. She was a mid-six-figure executive.
What most people in the UK seem to forget for some reason is that the original term for the sport was “soccer” and it was the English who first called it that.
When all other variations of the game – including “football” – with no specific sets of rules were scrapped due to soccer’s popularity, people started calling soccer “football.”
I don’t know the last part of the story but I do know some Brits so I have to assume it was the whiners who preferred the game they called “football” who got their knickers in a bunch and said, “they lost the plot yeh chaps, we’re dubbin’ it ‘football’! That was the real sport yeh wankers.”
…and everyone just nodded along to avoid them to the point that now they all believe it was the original term and we, in North America, are “not real” for correctly using English (THEIR English) when it is, in fact, they who are not.
…okay…so I could be wrong about this on account of how I’m a sports heathen…but I think it has more to do with a somewhat british tendency to leave some words unspoken on the assumption that everyone “ought to know” somehow that they’re there long after there ceased to be any reason for that expectation
…so in much the same way that rugby is technically rugby football because some guy who went to a school called rugby once decided to manhandle the ball (more or less) football as the brits understand it…as distinguished from the old school football that was just a big mass of people basically fighting over who got to be at the front chasing the ball that was the nominal excuse for why it wasn’t called a riot (or just a brawl)…is, I think, technically something called “association football”…& being british they decided it would be “easier to understand” if they dropped the football bit from rugby & the association bit from football & then assumed the rest of the world wouldn’t have the temerity to pick another game in which the ball is mostly handled rather than kicked & call it football
…it’s possibly for this reason that many brits say disparaging things about american football like “it’s basically rugby except easier because you can cheat (pass the ball in a forward direction) & you get to wear pads”
…having watched a bit of american football in my time I’m not sure I’d agree about the padding being an affectation…but having known a fair few rugby players in my time…I most likely wouldn’t argue with them about it, either?
…I’m not sure it would be quite the same thing but Alaistair Cooke’s “Letter from America” might be sort of in the ballpark?
…I think some of the scripts were published in a book & according to wikipedia Boston University hosts an archive of them but of the nearly 3,000 of them that aired about 1,500 can (I think) be listened to on the BBC iPlayer platform
…to say it was something of an institution when I was growing up might qualify as one of those terribly-british understatements that are somewhat of a birthright for those of us who were in fact born on the rainy little place that thinks it’s not in Europe anymore but none the less flatters itself to be a green & pleasant land?
There is much to be said in support of understatement in our world of hyperbolic drama.
…thinking about it, there are also several books by Bill Bryson that might be worth checking out…technically he was born in the states but he has dual citizenship these days & I believe has lived mostly in the UK since the 70s (when he was in his 20s)
…but I think the book about the state of the states I remember most fondly is by someone kind of famously american
I had forgotten about “Letter from America.” I wonder how fleetingly topical the subjects were.
Hooper, for example, describes why Italians are so crazy about race car driving. You still see this in Mediterranean Europe. For the Italians, it was because Ferrarri cars used to win so often. In America we have the Indy 500 (another thing I’ve never understood) but imagine if every mid-size city in America had one regularly. And why didn’t the Germans embrace this? Autobahns didn’t used to have speed limits. They were used to driving fast; wouldn’t it have been interesting to watch professional drivers go even faster? I think I read somewhere that Boston’s mayor proposed a Boston version, sponsors were lined up, plans were made, and the whole thing was a catastrophe and never took place.
…on the germans-driving-fast thing…I was never a big fan of the show Top Gear but I remember there was an episode where they sent Clarkson to the Nürburgring with some luxury diesel car & he had a target time he found difficult to get under while bitching about the various shortcomings he perceived the car to have…to give him a fair shake they had a young lady who lived locally sit in the passenger seat & give him some tips (I think just the first time around) before he tried his time trial
…after showing the segment the other presenters then cheerfully annoounced that there was a bit more & they cut back to the girl being given this car for a lap & handily beating his time with what looked like considerable ease…which I probably enjoyed more than might be considered seemly since I tend to think Clarkson is considerably more full of himself than he has any business being
…from my recollections the Letter to America stuff would have some bits that might have been too topical to have much in the way of lasting interest but those were often interspersed with some musings that I imagine might have aged rather better?
…either way, dated or not, I’m tempted to dig out my copy of the Steinbeck & read it again…it’s possible I’m in the minority but I think it’s something of an underrated gem
Good morning @Elliecoo and fellow Deadsplinters.
Busy week, didn’t read anything new.
I watched a couple episodes of Ratched on Netflix. It’s typical Ryan Murphy, over the top fun. But I can’t help feeling disappointed. Nurse Ratched from Cuckoo’s Nest was scary because she was so ordinary. Think of all the teachers, bosses, even friends and partners who feel the need to control everything. And it seems like a missed opportunity to explore what happened to turn her into a woman only able to wield her authority over the most vulnerable men. I’m not in any hurry to finish it but probably will eventually. The acting is good, the production design fantastic.
I listened to the Spooked podcast, from Snap Judgment. It’s one of my Halloween traditions.
And the new version of Tame Impala Why Won’t They Talk To Me
I do enjoy Tame Impala, and a good spooky story as well.
I’ve been catching up on shows that everyone’s told me to watch, but I wasn’t in the mood at the time – Succession, Ozark, The Boys – I just finished season 2 of Fargo – good stuff.
I’m reading a book about real life turn of the century female private detective Grace Quackenbos Humisten called Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. She’s pretty amazing. I’m surprised that no one has made a movie or tv series about her.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mrs-sherlock-holmes-brad-ricca/1124482784?ean=9781250160836
I enjoy anything Holmesian; in the Brain Drain two weeks I mentioned a series of novels about Charlotte Holmes and her imaginary brother Sherlock, that you might enjoy.
…as it happens, I too only just got around to catching up on the first couple of seasons of Succession…so like everyone else I’m now wondering how long a wait we’ll have for season 3
I watched the Borat sequel, and like the original it has a lot of parts that fall really flat mixed in with some gross humor I had to pause because I was laughing too hard.
Giuliani is as awful as you can imagine, although *that* scene is fortunately short and not explicit.
A lot of the dead air is because most of the normal people they recruited are stumbling in front of the camera and more baffled than anything else. But the actress who plays Borat’s daughter is a great comedian and runs away with her scenes.
Thank you for watching it and reporting. I kinda feel like his schtick verges on mean?
I watched Young Wallander on Netflix. I enjoyed it over all. The initial murder is gruesome, but after that it’s not too bad.
I’ve not quite gone there; because I know what happens to old Wallendar.