The Week in Entertainment

somewhat abbreviated, and next week's will be even shorter - vacation!


TV: The Mentalist, and of course the Homeland Security guy works for Red John ... bleaaaaagh. Otherwise, a nice ep - good to see Van Pelt again. Psych's 100th episode - I'm not a huge fan of the 'you pick the ending', and I would have preferred it not be "the butler did it!" but still it was a funny episode, with great guest stars. (Yes, Dr Who started, but it's on the DVR back in Maryland...)

Read: The Philosophical Practicioner, a rather peculiar detective-ish novel that was very enjoyable. B.U.G. (Big Ugly Guy) by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, a very good YA about a bullied middle-school kid who builds a golem...

Stop second-guessing me, Google

Earlier I complained that Google was correcting my Ukrainian to show me what it thought I wanted.

Now it's doing the same thing with NCAA, women versus men. Hello, Google guys? If I wanted to see the men I'd search for them. NCAAW is hardly likely to be a typo for NCAA. Grrr.

Just to be clear, I don't mind when it tries to guess what I want. That can and has saved me a lot of keystrokes. I don't even mind a quiet little "Did you mean...?" at the top of the results page. But stop assuming that what I end up searching on is not what I really wanted.

Round of Sixteen!

Tennessee moved past Creighton 68-52 to reach the round of 16. The Lady Vols are now 52-0 in NCAA tournament games on their home floor, with an all-time NCAA tournament record of 114-23 (including eight national titles and 18 Final Four appearances). They meet Oklahoma in the next round.These two didn't meet during the season; should be a good game.

Then on to face Baylor, in a recap of December's rowdy game - though this time with a different outcome, I hope!

It doesn't actually look like the Parthenon...

Category: Awards
Clue: For 2012 the front of these showed Nike stepping out of the Parthenon and the reverse, the Thames.

This was a Final Jeopardy?

Yeah, they all got it. As they should have.

(I'd never have guessed "the Thames" is what that was...)

Billy Ray

Hah.

It's all in where you're from, isn't it? On The Mentalist a woman tells Lisbon to find her (dead) foster daughter's no-good thug of a boyfriend, "her one bad choice", Billy Ray Sheen.

Or, oops, Billy Racine.

Overzealous

Today I tried to buy Doctor Who stamps at the Royal Mail's website. My debit card was "not authorized". I tried a credit card. Ditto. Another. So I gave up.

Then I got an email telling me to contact the Fraud Prevention department. Reason?

Transaction for $xxx at a post office was declined on or around 03/26/2013 in INTERNET, United Kingdom.

Yeah. Apparently Royal Mail dot com came up as an actual, brick-and-mortar post office. In a town called INTERNET. In the UK.

I appreciate the fraud prevention (not so much the three phone calls to straighten it out), but you'd think they would recognize an Internet site as someplace I do, in fact, shop at. Even a UK one (hello, Amazon.co.uk?). At least the Chase rep stayed on line and authorized the purchase for me (Doctor Who stamps! Yay!).

Whaaaaaa?

Seriously, people? 1998? Last American to stay there? The International Space Station? There are three Americans there right now.

How did 2 of 3 contestants not know that? (The answer was Mir.)

ps - Pat Sajak just said, apropos of a puzzle "Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame": "I have a star on the walk of fame. Vanna has a star. Alex Trebek has a pentagram - it's very odd."

She didn't like Gage?

I'm reading a romance/cozy called The Final Arrangement (I doubt I'll read more by the author unless it really improves; I understand why the sleuth always hooks up with a cop - ease of plotting - but the whole "he's so gorgeous I'm drooling the second I see him, and within two days we're obviously an item" school of writing annoys me). The protagonist is inconsistently written, plus she (in the tradition of the worst of the genre) and the cop are really slow to grasp that someone's after her. (In those two days her van is hit, two fires are set at her house, someone makes a "breather" call, and two tires on her van just spontaneously blow up - and a red pickup is seen at least twice while this is going on?)

The author also has a  habit of capitalizing the quote tag after question marks or periods, which is noticeable enough when it's a name like Alex or the pronoun I, but really catches your eye when it's a different pronoun ("What are you doing?" He said.).

But when I typed that into my phone I discovered that it does that automatically. Probably her software does too, and she just never noticed.

Something else which is very funny:  she apparently changed the murder victim's name from Gage to Derrick. Why do I think that? Because words like "enDerrickd" and "enDerrickment party" keep showing up. Too funny.

360 degrees of grumpiness

I don't know why this is so funny. But it is.

Karma Chameleon?

Maybe, maybe not. But this mother and baby are creepy cute, aren't they?

Lauren?

Alex Trebek just called Lorne Greene "Lauren".  Weird.

Not for me, thanks

Olympus Has Fallen is, according to its star-cum-producer, a revenge flick.

It's not just a movie about efficiently taking out terrorist bad guys. It's a movie about making them pay. The feeling hje wanted to evoke was that the movie's villains "need to be eradicated - but also hurt as well. It's that feeling - that we wanted to make these guys suffer."

Okay. I think I can do very well without watching a movie that celebrates hurting people and making them suffer. Some things, even if necessary, shouldn't be celebrated. Some things shouldn't make us cheer.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Lewis Season 7. I do love Robbie Lewis. I'm sad this is the end of the show.Lovely to see Edward Fox in the final episode (he's Laurence Fox, who plays Hathaway,'s uncle).

TV: The Mentalist back on surer ground with a story that never mentions the demigod they've turned Red John into (I suppose this is part of the current serial killer craze on tv nowadays). (But it missed the mark on some details.) And then finally caught up on Psych, which had a cute ref to The Mentalist (again) in the first episode, and then two more - the bigfoot episode, hilarious (poor Lassie) with another great Juliet saves the day bit and full new credits! Followed by Henry in peril in Mexico (No Country for Two Old Men), very funny especially when Juliet recaps the off-screen developments and Gus says "you already told us that in the car" and she says "I have to cover the bases" and Shawn and Gus look at each other: "For who?"  - and they gave us a Latin version of the credits (arriba!).Grimm - caught up on that. Two good episodes though the one about the fly-thing? Gross. Also - Hank? Trust the blutbad: if Monroe didn't see the guy come out the back, he didn't come out the back.

Read: A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki's fascinating novel about a woman in British Columbia who finds the diary of a Japanese girl washed up on the shore, carefully packed away and presumably delivered by the ocean after the tsunami. Reading Nao's words from years earlier, Ruth finds herself drawn into the life of a girl she will never meet...

March you know what

It has begun.

UT won their first round (as they should have!) and we'll just have to see how far they can go.

Garsington? Really?

Another data point in aw-vs-or: In Lewis "Down Among the Fearful", there's a riding stable featured called Garsington. I thought it was Gossington till I saw it written.

Amen

I laughed out loud and then cheered silently. From the Carolyn Hax chat today:

Q. Involuntary time off

Dear Carolyn, I got laid off from my full-time job last year and have only been able to find part-time work since then (but my husband still has a great job, so I'm fortunately not destitute). My life is still quite full (friends, family, involvement with a community organization, etc), but most of it is stuff I want to do, versus stuff I have to do, so I feel a little self-conscious talking about my day when my husband gets home from a grueling 10-hour workday and starts doing household chores. Until I have a better job again, how can I avoid feeling so useless?

A.

Do more household chores.

Hello Alex!

Alex has seriously never heard of Hello Kitty?? What world is he living in? The contestant was right!

(ps: What country did the current president of France's ancestors emigrate from? This was Final Jeopardy? Really? And yet, two of them got it wrong. The one who said Czech Republic might have been thinking of Sarkozy, I suppose, though he is actually of Hungarian descent. But Spain? François Hollande?)

Below, just a tiny few of the things Hello Kitty decorates - from camcorders to hotel rooms to trams...

The Army...

Watching The Mentalist on dvr, and it is displaying a lot of ignorance about the army. He's a first lieutenant; of course this is his first significant command. It's probably his first command period.. Also, I find it hard to believe that an E-7, Sergeant First Class, is scared of a lieutenant.

And if Lucy is a corporal after 11 years (she "joined after 9/11"), she's not "an outstanding soldier". Or at least not one going anywhere. You're eligible at 24 months. It's automatic at 48 months, unless there are good reasons for it not to happen, and you wouldn't be still in the army.

(Plus: doesn't Cho know you don't salute sergeants? "Don't salute me, I work for a living" is a serious saying.)

IATB: Herons

This edition of I and the Bird is all about herons. Great posts and photos.

Burr? Burr??

Today's Jumble featured tourists in a freezing city, captioned "When they visited the capital of Germany in the frigid weather, they visited" "_ _ _ _" - _ _ _. The clue letters were RUNIRBL. The answer? "Burr-lin". Burrlin? Give me a break. BRRR-LIN. That's how you spell that. Sheesh.

The right to define

"Just because I believe states should have the right to define marriage in a traditional way does not make me a bigot," Rubio said. (source)

Well, Rubio, when I hear you say that DOMA should be struck down (instead of defended), then I'll believe that you think states have the right to follow Maryland and Maine and Washington and DC and the rest in defining marriage as "non-traditional" - whatever the hell you think that means. Once, "traditional" would have meant within the race or religion; once it would have meant one man-quite a few wives (ask Mitt Romney. Or David).

But till then, I'm going to think you mean "states should have the right" to agree with you. That is, after all, the way that usually works with you guys.

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Francesca da Rimini at the Met - an excellent performance.

TV: Caught up on Grimm - wow. Things are definitely spinning out of control. But I've always like Renard, for some reason, so I'm glad to see them working together. The Mentalist - dammit, Red John again. For crying out loud, how many acolytes does he have? I'm so tired of this storyline... This show is better when that's just Jayne's tragic backstory. Two eps of The Neighbors, very funny - especially the "Broadway Musical" one (with the sad ending for poor Reggie Jackson).

Read: A couple more Perry Masons. Also, Wool and its three prequels - wow. Terrific story, it just grabs you and doesn't let go.

Not usual

So, I just renewed my pledge to Maryland Public Television. The volunteer read my card number back, not in the usual four groups of four numbers, but in a trinome, a bunch of dinomes, and a single number at the end. Amazing how hard it was to recognize it!

3.14.....

С днем числа ... Happy ___ Day!

Oh, no

Oh, no, Drew. Eugene O'Neill did not write "Come Blow Your Horn". Eugene O'Neill never wrote comedy in his life, let alone for "Your Show of Shows"!

(And seriously? A haircut as a type of surgery?)

Very helpful!

So I rescheduled a UPS delivery to a store, since I'm not, you know, able to take the afternoon off the wait for the package, and don't want my new cell phone sitting in the hallway. They did it easily enough on the web page, and offered to show me a map to the store. Here is it:



Yeah, that'll be helpful! (and note: no pin, so zooming in is pointless...)

ps - this was yesterday; already have the phone.

Habemus gaviam

Oh, and a pope, too, for the appropriate values of "we." Habent papam, so to speak.

Well. That didn't take very long. You gotta figure it will be more of the same. After all, CNS says of the new guy:

His homilies and speeches are filled with references to the fact that all people are brothers and sisters and that the church and the country need to do what they can to make sure that everyone feels welcome, respected and cared for.

Which is of course, great. But he doesn't seem to have spoken out on the abuse scandal, and they have to note that

Some controversy had arisen over the position taken by Cardinal Bergoglio during Argentina's 1976-1983 military dictatorship, which cracked down brutally on political opponents. Estimates of the number of people killed and forcibly disappeared during those years range from about 13,000 to more than 30,000.

Citing a case in which two young priests were detained by the military regime, critics say that the cardinal, who was Jesuit provincial at the time, did not do enough to support church workers against the military dictatorship.

They also note that

In 2010, when Argentina became the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage, Cardinal Bergoglio encouraged clergy across the country to tell Catholics to protest against the legislation because, if enacted, it could "seriously injure the family," he said.

He also said adoption by same-sex couples would result in "depriving (children) of the human growth that God wanted them given by a father and a mother."

In 2006, he criticized an Argentine proposal to legalize abortion under certain circumstances as part of a wide-ranging legal reform. He accused the government of lacking respect for the values held by the majority of Argentines and of trying to convince the Catholic Church "to waver in our defense of the dignity of the person."

So, yeah, "everyone feels welcome, respected and cared for" as long as they're certain kinds of everyone, not just any everyone.

So, you know, I wish the Catholic Church good luck. I wish the world more.

exxxxxxcellent.

Here's a story from the Ukrainian online paper Unian about an accident caused when a tree cut down by beavers nearly fell on a bus heading to Odesa.

The picture accompanying the story is of a beaver, and his expression is priceless. He looks like he should be high-fiving those squirrels from the insurance commercial. Check it out: very funny.

Bad Timing

I know there's a long lead time in comics, but surely the Rhymes With Orange guys could have gotten this one postponed - to when there isn't actually a current - nay, major - event filled with Latin.

Great Egrets

I can't believe I never posted these. But here they are - great egrets in breeding plumage - look at those plumes: they're why the birds were nearly hunted into extinction. These fellows were in Oregon; we passed them on the why to Golden and Silver Falls, April 5, 2011.

Did you mean? Not found!

Later this summer I'll be working out of a different building for a while. I was checking the commute out and ... well, take a look. First I started to enter the Metro stop, and it offered me the complete name.



But when I moved to the next screen ...



Those are not only all three the same stop, but they told me what to put in!

Perry Mason and language changing

I've been reading some Perry Mason novels lately. They're good mysteries, and Mason in the books is very different from the Raymond Burr version. Oh, not as wild as the movies, but he drinks and dances and dallies with Della Street, and he definitely crosses the line in his investigations. Paul Drake is not the idiot he is in the movies, though, which is a relief; I was fond of the way William Hopper played him.

But, as is to be expected from books written in the 30s and 40s (and on into the 60s, I suppose), there's a lot of casual slang and linguistic constructions that are no longer in use. A lot of them involve prepositions - either different or missing, for example they say "go" where we'd say "go for", as "Could you go a steak?"

Here's a nice difference from what we'd say - fill instead of full, and written as two words: "She blabs everything she knows and then comes running back for forgiveness - or perhaps to get another ear fill to peddle."

This one's really odd: "We dined at The Golden Lion. I had a filet mignon medium rare on the dinner. You ate French fried prawns on the dinner." (The "French fried prawns", capital F and no hyphen is strange looking, too, isn't it?)

Here's a striking phrasal verb that we've lost: "I had to check out nearly every penny in my bank" meaning "I had to write a check for nearly every penny".

Or how about "It's about time! Here we are in a jam and bull; your operator has been fiddling around - " Jam and bull? I can't find that on Google, so I don't know if it's idiosyncratic to the character, or was common(ish) slang.

But this is the weirdest - clearly deriving from this meaning of outlaw, with which I was unfamiliar till now: to remove from legal jurisdiction or enforcement. Mason tells someone that "murder never outlaws, you know" and he means there's no statute of limitations on it.

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Looped, a wonderful play about Tallulah Bankhead.

TV: Caught up with The Mentalist (two episodes) - I loved the museum one, particularly the heist with Rigsby playing with the tarantula, and Cho's answer to Rigby wanting to know why Jane wanted them to do something: "I stopped asking why a long time ago." Plus, Rigsby's retort to Cho's calling him a coward: "Yeah, well, you date pregnant hookers and your dinosaur eats grass!" - delivered, of course, after Cho had left the room.

Read: A number of Perry Mason books - quite addictive.

Two birds

Since I changed my office I haven't gotten many bird photos, but here are a couple - a blue jay and a Carolina wren.

A horn? Really?

So I'm watching the 1942 movie Wings of the Eagle - about Lockheed during WWII - and Dennis Morgan's character just told his friend to call up a girl and ask her out to dinner. He said: "Why don't you give her a horn on the phone?"

ROFLtastic

From the White House:

Dow sets new record. Yes. High.

This is why the GOP is so blase about the sequester so far: the Dow has never been higher than it is right now.

The market is only tenuously connected to the average American, dropping when employment is high, rising when people get laid off, but this is a poster-child illustration. People who "make" their money by investments are happy as pigs in clover right now; people who work for it? Not so much.

National Grammar Day? Again?

Wow, National Grammar Day snuck up on me. So I'll just link you to two other people's posts. First, Kory Stamper's love-hate feeling about the day.

But I also hate National Grammar Day, because it ends up being less a celebration of the weirdness of English and more an annual conclave of the peeververein (as gentleman-copyeditor John E. McIntyre so eloquently calls them).... You may think you are some great Batman of Apostrophes, flitting through the dark aisles of the Piggly-Wiggly, bringing Truth and Justice to tormented signs everywhere! But in reality, you are a jerk who has defaced a sign that some poor kid, or some poor non-native English speaker, or some educated and beleaguered mom who is working her second job of the day, spent time making. It’s not as though they see your handiwork and fall to their knees praising John Dryden because now they see the error of their ways. No–all they see is that the manager is going to make them do the sign again. And they may not have the education to understand why you took a Sharpie to their “2 tomato’s / $1″ sign.

And then there's Gabe's annual Grammar Myths Debunked at Motivated Grammar.

Just a Theory ... Again (Sigh)

So, the Ohio Supreme Court is finally hearing the case of that teacher who pushed creationism and Christianity, since all the lower courts upheld his being fired.

Here's the most disheartening thing of all.

Justices appeared perplexed, at times irritated, about what lawyers believed was the legal issue before them.

Justice Paul Pfeifer was incredulous when Mr. Smith argued that Mr. Freshwater's evolution class wouldn't have been covered under the school district's controversial-issues policy.

"So there's nothing controversial about evolution," he said. "It is a theory, isn't it?"

Yes, Mr Justice, it is. Like gravity and germs and relativity and heliocentrism...

As they say at Not Just a Theory:

In everyday use, theory means a guess or a hunch, something that maybe needs proof. In science, a theory is not a guess, not a hunch. It's a well-substantiated, well-supported, well-documented explanation for our observations. It ties together all the facts about something, providing an explanation that fits all the observations and can be used to make predictions. In science, theory is the ultimate goal, the explanation. It's as close to proven as anything in science can be.

Some people think that in science, you have a theory, and once it's proven, it becomes a law. That's not how it works. In science, we collect facts, or observations, we use laws to describe them, and a theory to explain them. You don't promote a theory to a law by proving it. A theory never becomes a law.

This bears repeating. A theory never becomes a law. In fact, if there was a hierarchy of science, theories would be higher than laws. There is nothing higher, or better, than a theory. Laws describe things, theories explain them. An example will help you to understand this. There's a law of gravity, which is the description of gravity. It basically says that if you let go of something it'll fall. It doesn't say why. Then there's the theory of gravity, which is an attempt to explain why. Actually, Newton's Theory of Gravity did a pretty good job, but Einstein's Theory of Relativity does a better job of explaining it. These explanations are called theories, and will always be theories. They can't be changed into laws, because laws are different things. Laws describe, and theories explain.

Whoas!

The famous Hugo novel and even more famous stage (now movie) musical is usually pronounced by Americans /leɪ ˌmɪzəˈrɑːb/; the French say ​/le mizeʁabl(ə)/. But Alex, who prides himself on his French, actually just said /le mizeʁabləz/. Yes. He pronounced that final S on Misérables!

Words???

Surely I'm not the only one amused/annoyed/perplexed when Capcha tells me to "type the two words" and then presents me with a number and a string of letters (e.g. 345 udentchi).

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Parsifal with Jonas Kaufmann in the title role and René Pape as Gurnemanz - both of them were amazing. But I find I have problems when the libretto tells me one thing (like "forest") and the staging is showing me something else (like a wasteland).

TV: Wednesday's trio: "You can't date my sister!.. I'm gonna date your mom!" "You better get in there, 'cause she just met someone on Christian Mingle." But OMFG ROFL for real - Reggie Jackson doing The Graduate with the alpaca.And Psych is back!. Yay! Of course, Henry did not die, but wow Sean went off the deep end on this one. And I loved the FBI guy saying to them "It took us six months to get this far" and Sean's response "Really? "Cause it took me all of three hours." And Lassie - he really came through.

Read: Better Nate Than Ever, an adorable novel about a boy heading for NYC to take an audition - out of the blue, with no experience, just an enormous love for musical theater. Two by Jonathan Kellerman - Mystery and Guilt, both very good entries in the series. Amazon has put some Perry Mason novels on Kindle, and I read a couple (The Case of the Lucky Loser and ... Silent Partner) which were quite good mysteries.

Dydd Dewi Sant

It's Saint David's Day - Saint David, known is Wales as Dewi Sant. Unlike some saints, this one is pretty well pinned down in history - a monk whose father was the king of Ceredigion (Sandde or Sant some call him, but that seems to have been a call-name, or nick-name, meaning "holy" and his actual name to have been Usai). He founded a monastic order of a pretty austere nature, and later became a bishop. His best-known miracle was to create a hill under his feet when people at the back of the crowd complained they couldn't see (the historian John Davies considers it difficult to "conceive of any miracle more superfluous" in mountainous Wales, but there it is.) He went on pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem both, returning home to govern the Church in Wales. On his deathbed, he passed on a saying which has become proverbial, and which is good advice to this day: Gwnewch y pethau bychain, Do the little things. (GOO-nayookh uh PE-thai BUHkhain)