Saturday Morning Brain Drain [26/3/22]

a place to let it all out

What I watched:  Well…I was going to say I watched Stanley Tucci:  Searching for Italy, Season 2, but clearly that didn’t happen.  So, instead I’m watching Season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  After such a long hiatus, it was difficult to get reoriented to the various story lines and characters.  I’m sure Amazon just figured everyone would watch the previous season to catch up, but I’ve got shit to do.  Anyway, the show is still hilarious.  Alex Borstein has a scene in episode three that will knock your socks off. If you haven’t yet seen this series, it is definitely worth watching, but you have to be able to keep up because the dialog is very fast.  Aaron Sorkin has got nothing on Amy Sherman-Palladino.

What I read:  Starborn and Godsons, which is the final book in the Heorot Series by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes.  The series, overall, is very good and certainly as readable and engaging as everything else I’ve read by Niven and Pournelle.  This third book took the story line to a whole new level and I’m honestly disappointed that they only wrote three books for this series…but Pournelle died right before it was published so I don’t see Niven and Barnes keeping it going.

What I listened to:  Our latest stop on the best engineered albums of all time brings us to Aja by Steely Dan, engineered by Roger Nichols, Elliot Scheiner, Al Schmitt and Bill Schnee–all of whom are world class engineers.  Most of the albums by these guys are of excellent sonic quality and Aja is no exception.  There were something like 40 different session musicians who played on this album, which makes its overall sonic coherence that much more impressive.  I’m going to drop a couple of the album cuts here because you already know the hits.

As you’re reading this, I will have been in New Mexico for three days already, visiting mi madre.  We’ll be in Taos by now, on something of a fake camping trip.  After 20 years, Mrs. Butcher finally said she would go camping with me…but what she really meant was in an RV, which is NOT camping—it is RVing.  But, I knew that was as close as it was going to get, and my mother and her husband have a camper which makes it easy.  However, you can bet your ass that I will be sleeping in a tent outside, because that is actual camping.  Anyway, by this time I will have had a ton of New Mexican cuisine which I have sorely missed, seen an old friend, and generally enjoyed the scenery and the weather.  It is truly the Land of Enchantment.  We will be flying home on Monday, which will be way too soon for my taste, but we don’t want Butcher Dog getting too attached to the house sitter.

Anyway, tell us what you’ve been watching, reading and/or listening to.  Any plans for a spring trip?  I recommend Northern New Mexico.

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About butcherbakertoiletrymaker 595 Articles
When you can walk its length, and leave no trace, you will have learned.

34 Comments

  1. I finished Season 5 of Vikings, which was really well-done, especially considering where Season 4 ended.  Some beautifully scripted battle scenes.  The Ivar character is a little overdone.  The Floki side story doesn’t add much.

    I watched Free Guy, which was surprisingly enjoyable, considering I don’t particularly like Ryan Reynolds and I don’t play computer games.

    I watched the pilot for Yellowstone.  I don’t get it.  What is the appeal of shows where basically every single character is a loathsome dirtbag?

    • White people being strong pioneer type white people doing white peopling stuff for their own freedom and family.

      I’ve seen a few episodes of Yellowstone and I can’t say that my comment is the plot of show, but definitely that’s the ethos that makes so many (white) people rave about it.

  2. This is for @elliecoo

    We’re still making our way through the “Murdoch Mysteries” and I for one am really enjoying it. I feel like we must be running out of episodes but who knows, there are so many. In a recent episode they mentioned that it was 1907, so they’re going at a glacial, “Downton Abbey”-esque pace.

    But they’ve added a few more characters and now the characters are as breathtakingly diverse as could be possible, certainly much more diverse than any academically-sponsored diversity panel, and the additions are all organically introduced and un-self-consciously logical and believable, unlike whatever they’re try to do with the reboot of “Sex and the Apartheid City.” An actual resident of Toronto from 1907 would find this impossible to believe, I bet, but that’s show business.

    In addition (I hope this isn’t a spoiler alert, but you already mentioned Murdoch and Dr. Ogden getting married) after some fits and starts they build a house for themselves and it is absolutely magnificent. I will not describe it further but if it existed in real life it would leap to the top of the Canadian registry of historic places. Every scene set within the house brings on that strange feeling of “I am delighted to see this” mixed with “I hate them both for having this.” But that’s show business, too.

    • We really enjoy the way they weave real people, current events of the time, and “invent” a modern whatever each time (frisbee, room a, whatever). Murdoch is still way too uptight, but the good doctor keeps him line.

      • There’s an episode in whatever season I’m in where there’s a convention of sorts and about a dozen real-life people show up. There’s one in particular that the show makes fun of, and one that they lionize, and both have made previous appearances.

        I will say no more.

  3. I tried watching Mrs Maisel and didn’t care for it. I don’t like the way Amy Sherman-Pallidino writes dialogue. It’s all snappy one liners and witty repartee. A little bit of that goes a long way with me. I hated The Gilmour Girls for that reason too. Nobody talks like that all the time. But most people I know love it. 🤷🏻‍♀️
    Still watching The Dropout and am amazed how long it took some people to catch on to her. And it’s not hindsight, there were other people telling them it was all lies. It’s not that she was even good at getting them to believe her. It was all so weird and shifty. They wanted it to be true.

    • Mark me down as loving it, both on Gilmore Girls and Mrs. Maisel. Yes, it’s not realistic, but people don’t randomly break out into song but I still love musicals. I guess I’m saying it’s stylized but I like it.

      POSSIBLE SPOILERS

      I will say that that Amy Sherman-Palladino shows have a finite lifespan, and Gilmore Girls exceeded that and got very weak at the end. It seems like ASP runs out of important things to cover, so we start getting manufactured drama. Both my wife and I noted it on Maisel, and noticed the similarities to the end of GG.

      Midge is simply doing stupid things now — getting involved in situations that are dumb (married man), shooting her mouth off when performing (too many times to mention), turning down major opportunities (nobody does that). I was glad to see the Lenny Bruce character chew her ass about it. Somewhere I saw it called “carrying the idiot stick” where a character does uncharacteristically dumb things to generate drama. I like the show but the fifth season will be enough.

      • Yeah in general I think a lot of shows run past their expiration date because of simply being a cash cow.

        And I think sitcoms particularly aren’t pitched with any sort of “end plan” for the character arc, so it’s like wellllll let’s just keep writing little 23 minute blips because that works for ratings and money.

        Whereas I think about some of the HBO shows like Watchmen where I desperately wanted a second season but also I know the story was written to be a single season plot.

  4. Last weekend thru Tuesday a friend of mine that graduated from Gonzaga was visiting.  He is the only person I can honestly say watches WAY more basketball than me so we watched too much March Madness games.  When we had no more to watch, I remembered @bluedogcollar   mentioned a Kareem documentary so we watched that…

    We learned a bunch of things we didn’t realize about him and it was really well done.

    Listening to new Jim Lindberg tune, very good storytelling…

    Wife left for California this morning so I’m going to check out a few new breweries with the boys and maybe stop by the homebrew store so I can brew and stink up the house while she is away.

    • They probably could have turned that Kareem documentary into a miniseries considering how much he’s done, but I’m sure he would have run out of patience. Just his movies could have had another 20 minutes of time.

  5. I’m finally finishing S5 of the Expanse.  I didn’t like the pacing of S4 so it took forever (1 1/2 years) to finish it (the plot elements took soooo long.)  S5 is bit more like the Expanse of S1-S3.

    I smiled when I immediately recognized the Sec Gen as Mr Mehta from Kim’s Convenience.  BTW, did you know the actor Sugith Varughese was one of the original writers of Fraggle Rock?  I didn’t.

  6. I saw The Mitchells vs. the Machines. A vaguely eccentric family battles a robot apocalypse.

    It’s pretty good in a non threatening PG animated movie way. Lots of digs at a techlord named Mark that I appreciated.

  7. Hi Butcher!  Thank you for the BrainDrain! As always, I am hoarding content for the next three weeks.  Happy vacation to you and Mrs. B.

  8. We are watching new episodes of The Bay on Netflix and I’m saving up Bridgerton for later!!!

  9. BRIDGERTON SEASON 2

    I watched 4 episodes last night and then I made myself stop and go to bed. I needed sleep, dammit, to be a functional (somewhat) adult for the rest of the weekend.

    I will say if you haven’t started it yet — and this is no spoilers for plot — there’s been no actual sex scenes so far this season so if you felt like last season was *looks to the left, sex* and *looks to the right, sex* this season is following the more traditional Regency era romance book pacing of using lots of verbal flirtation and steamy looks before our characters get some action.

    • I read that this season was going to be less, um, graphic I guess, than last season, and there was a debate about whether the audience was tuning in for the sex or tuning out because of the sex. I bet for Season 3 (I assume there will be one) they’ll pick one scenario or the other, depending on what the ratings show.

      • All the sex didn’t bother me because most sex scenes in movies are all “BOOBIES!!!” and this leaned more towards male nudity and the female gaze, so I was like wow nice change oh hey another sex scene.

  10. I’ve been sleeping my way through The Endgame… I should rephrase. I’ve fallen asleep through every episode of The Endgame. It’s an ok show I guess.

    Transplant is back! It’s a hospital show set in Toronto and the lead Dr is a Syrian refugee. The best hospital show currently on TV (Grey’s sucks so bad now it hurts me to watch it. New Amsterdam is so so. I haven’t watched The Resident since SPOILER the woman from Revenged died and Mina Okafor left. There’s a new show with that dude who looks like a rough John Hamm and it is so bad that I couldn’t get through more than the first 10min).

  11. The last time I went camping in a tent, there was a massive thunderstorm, and when I got up to make sure nothing was leaking (spoiler: it was), I realized that the floor was a literal pool and was absolutely swimming in earwigs. That was quite enough of that nonsense for me. I am firmly on Mrs. Butcher’s side. Especially these days. Tents are for kids and other people with good backs.

    Anyway.

    Watching: Bestie introduced Other-Husband and KidSmacks3 to Rust Valley Restorers on Netflix, and they’re both now obsessed with it. I’m pretty sure we haven’t watched anything else all week.

    Reading: a bunch of romantic nonsense. Letty by Clare Darcy, which is a Regency romance from 1980. I found it on Openlibrary.org when I was looking for something else. It was cheesy but cute.

    Ten Things I Hate About the Duke by Loretta Chase. As the name suggests, there’s more than a hint of The Taming of the Shrew in it. Overall, not bad, although I could do with less of the hero beating himself over the head with what an awful person he used to be. I do love the descriptions of the clothes in her books, though.

    The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite, which is part of a series of F/F Regency romances that I stumbled across somehow. I’m  really enjoying them because there’s more focus on what the women DO  outside of what they do to each other. In this one, one of the women is a beekeeper and the other owns a print shop. Neither of them is an aristocrat or royalty, which is also a plus. There’s a lot of information about how printing worked in the early 1800’s, more than I thought I wanted to know about beekeeping, and enough in between to be interesting.

    The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark, which is kind of urban fantasy/kind of fairy tale about a woman who gets a job at a college, moves into a “haunted” house, and has, um, INTERESTING dreams about an incubus. If you object to over the top sex scenes, skip this one!

    Currently reading: The Courtesan’s Revenge by Frances Wilson. Non-fiction about Harriette Wilson, an 18th century courtesan who started her illustrious career at age 14, and appears to have slept with literally every rich man in London until she got older (all of mid-30’s, poor, ancient thing…), when she wrote her Memoirs and sent copies to all of said rich men, threatening to publish all the salacious (and sometimes insulting) details unless, of course, they’d like to contribute a little something to her pocket…? So far, it’s interesting, if a bit confusing, because she and 5 of her sisters seem to have swapped patrons on a weekly basis (no, thanks) and everyone in the ton is related to everyone else, anyway.

    Also currently reading: Hammered by Kevin Hearne, book 3 of tbe Iron Druid series. Not sure how I really feel about this one… it’s fast paced but seems more ridiculous and convoluted than the last 2 books. He’s trying to kill Thor and oops! Accidentally knocks off half the Norse pantheon. I started it at 3am when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.

    • when I got up to make sure nothing was leaking (spoiler: it was), I realized that the floor was a literal pool

      That is because whoever set up the tent had no clue what they were doing and that renders your Mrs. Butcher side of the argument moot.

      • @myopicprophet You’re not wrong… my dad wasn’t exactly the outdoorsy type! Also, this was in 1993 and the tent hadn’t been used since about 1978. One of those incredibly heavy canvas monstrosities.

  12. i just finished both seasons of beforeigners –  omg, loved!! (must also love subtitles);

    i’m also watching raised by wolves.

    • I wasn’t familiar with either of those, Googled and they both look good. But, I don’t have HBO anymore, dammit!

    • …caught the first season of raised by wolves but haven’t yet caught up with the second…but I think I wondered aloud in last week’s brain drain if anyone hereabouts had been watching that…so I guess now I have another incentive to watch the new stuff, thank you

  13. NERD ALERT: I’m very in on Season 2 of “Star Trek: Picard” which is (thankfully) quite different from the dour and slow first season. They’re still setting up the mystery of what’s going on — and we’ll see how that goes, as the dismount is always the hardest part for streaming shows — but so far it’s been fun and highly entertaining and I can’t ask for much more.

    Sadly, I’ve been listening to a lot of Foo Fighters today with the news about their drummer. Not my favorite band in the world, but it sounds like he was a good egg.

    ALSO: yes, god yes, camping does not equal RVing.

    • …speaking of nerd alerts…I’m liking the picard stuff but some persistent part of my brain wouldn’t let go of a dumb niggle about the part where he meets up with the eternal bartender

      …I’m fairly certain there was a next generation episode set in a period that included mark twain in which she appeared…it involved data’s head being buried somewhere & dug up in the future like a sentient time capsule but I forget the details

      …I could overlook the part where the casting means she looks younger at what is a later point in time but her not knowing picard tripped me up…which is sort of dumb…particularly if he wasn’t one of the crew she met in that episode or there’s some other reason I don’t remember why she wouldn’t recall…but it was distracting?

      • Alternate version of history where she didn’t meet him in that time travel past because their shared past didn’t happen in that version?

        • Ding, ding, ding! Separate timeline. Q fucked up everything. Could all get reset, could get mostly reset with some changes. But time travel is the ultimate hand-wave. Nerds need to relax.

          • …yeah…like I said, it’s a dumb niggle…just one that I had a hard time shaking for some reason

            …it’s not that I even had any certainty that handwaving was required since I don’t fully remember how that episode went…& I know it could be handwaved in a variety of ways…but it just kept nagging at me

            …& I guess if I had to try to pin down why…I think it’s because the way the timeline diverging has been framed seems to pretty heavily imply that the thing they’re trying to prevent that Q caused to turn out different wasn’t just the pivotal thing but was the point of divergence…which would have everything that happened before then be the same

            …& yes, if things in the future went different you could argue that “this time” picard was never the guy with the crew that had the mark twain episode stuff happen to them…but there’s an iterative aspect to how that stuff seems to work…& it sort of seems like that part would be some sort of temporal gordian knot?

            …originally no one from the next gen timeline went back & caused the buried android head thing…but then there was a timeline where that happened…& later in that timeline Q went back & caused it to branch off into a different sequence where that didn’t take place…which I get could be argued would…let’s call it revert that earlier episode to the way events played out without visitors from the future…but that’s a lot of recursive self-correcting that reality is doing all of a sudden after laying so much emphasis on how it all hinges on one different outcome in 2024

            …I don’t want to think about it long enough to wind up with a whole recursive flowchart like that guy who tried to explain how the loops worked in primer…but some bit of my brain kept worrying at it like a sore tooth while I watched the episode despite the rest of said brain telling it to STFU so I could enjoy the thing?

      • You have your details spot on, and I saw a few people speculate that it might be Data’s head (which, while cool fan service, doesn’t totally make sense?) I didn’t love what they did as an answer but as @brightersideoflife suggests, it also seems like this is an entirely separate timeline so rules may or may not apply? She didn’t know him but knew who he was. Hopefully some of that will get explained!

  14. For everyone on the discussion of “is an RV camping or is it only camping if it’s a tent?”

    In my family if someone says they’re going camping we’re like “what you’re staying at the Holiday Inn?”

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