1. HBOTW: Those grocery workers, baristas, and other people who closely deal with the public every day in these worrisome times. In my few recent encounters with them I have met nothing but Kindness.
2. I've been streaming (while waiting for Joyce to abandon her work and come join me in bed) a Netflix original called Middle School. My interest is natural: I taught in one for about thirty years.
So far (and I've not watched that much) it's about a creative, artistic kid mired in a rigorous, unimaginative school run by 2 doofuses and focused entirely on order and rules and standardized tests. I'll keep at it, I guess, though it seems, so far, not too surprising--except for the kid's drawings, which at times come alive in animation. Enjoying those moments.
Link to film trailer.
3. I finished two books this week ...
- The first (via Kindle) was Taming the Alien, the 2nd novel in Ken Bruen's The White Trilogy (1998-2000), a trio of books featuring London cop Tom Brant, a crude, lewd, violent dude (like the rhyme?), who will do just about anything to bring down a Bad Guy. (Don't know what a hurling stick is--a hurly? Better learn.)
He's after a killer this time (no surprise), but what is a surprise is the ending. Bruen often ends his novels--the Brant series, the Jack Taylor series--with something damaging to his hero--physically or psychologically. But this time ... I actually turned the page to see if there was more There wasn't.
- The second I finished this week was Christopher Moore's Fool (2009), one of his three novels about Pocket a diminutive, horny jester and his lumpy, large, dim apprentice named Drool. This one is based on King Lear (in which an actual fool appears, as you surely recall).
This novel takes the basic idea of Lear--the old, arrogant king who offers to divide his estate among three daughters; the daughter who gets the best portion will be the one who gives the best account of how much she loves Lear. In the play--and here--much goes very wrong, when the youngest, Cordelia, says she loves him--but no more than a daughter should. Oops. Buh-bye, inheritance.
Well, like the other two Fool novels (I'm about to finish the 3rd one, The Serpent of Venice), Moore is wildly funny, raunchy, imaginative and has no reservations about plopping into his text a number of lines from other Bard plays--and even characters from those plays. (Here, we meet the three witches from Macbeth)--"Parting is such sweet sorrow" (Romeo and Juliet), "there's the rub" (Hamlet), "the winter of our discontent" (Richard III), etc.
Oh, and we also get a reference to Green Eggs and Hamlet. And this is not at all the only anachronism. Moore is very fond of them.
Well the plot of the Bard's play goes haywire: people die here who do not die in the play (or in ways they did not die)--and Cordelia is hardly the character she is in Lear. By the end, in fact, she ... ain't tellin'.
One of the things I like about these Fool books is that Moore seems to be having the best time as he's imagining and writing them. His smile is on every page.
4. Just one more episode to stream of this season of Bosch on Amazon Prime. The TV Bosch is not a lot like Michael Connelly's LA detective in his books, but I've ... adjusted ... and am treating them as two very separate things. That way my BP rate remains low. Link to some video.
5. We're into the second season of Blood (via Acorn TV), and what a difference from season one, which focused on one daughter in the family (Cat Hogan), who, when her mother dies, is convinced it is not an accident--but a deliberate killing by ... The second season has a different focus, on another daughter, Fiona, who is having some ... issues ... of her own. The father, Jim, is played by Adrian Dunbar, a hero of the popular cop series Line of Duty--and he is here, to say the least, quite different from that upstanding police leader he plays in Line. Link to some video.
6. We're also enjoying A Confession, a limited cop series with Bilbo Baggins, uh, Martin Freeman as Det. Superintendent Stephen Fulcher--a based-on-a-true-story serial-killer investigation. So far, so good. Link to some video.
7. A bit nervous today--must go to Seidman Cancer Center tomorrow for blood tests and a nuclear bone scan. Not really looking forward to it--but I'll keep you posted.
8. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:
- from dictionary.com (a word dating back only till about 1970)
shambolic [sham-bol-ik ]
adjective: chiefly British Informal: very disorganized; messy or
confused: I’ve had a shambolic year, the worst ever.
ORIGIN: The word is a combination of shambles and symbolic.
Shambolic is a fairly recent coinage, entering English about 1970.
USAGE:
1 “A programme to train thousands of contact-tracers to help
control the spread of coronavirus has been described as shambolic and
inadequate by recruits.” FRANCES PERRAUDIN, "'NO ONE HAD ANY IDEA':
CONTACT TRACERS LACK KNOWLEDGE ABOUT COVID-19 JOB," THE GUARDIAN,
MAY 20, 2020
2. “If democratic procedures start to seem shambolic, then
democratic ideas will seem questionable as well. TIMOTHY SNYDER, "HOW A
RUSSIAN FASCIST IS MEDDLING IN AMERICA'S ELECTION," NEW YORK TIMES,
SEPTEMBER 20, 2016
Will be thinking of you tomorrow, Daniel. <3
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