The title kind of says it all.
While skimming social media this morning I read one passing reference to the 1975 pop music hit “The Hustle” and GUESS WHAT’S BEEN PLAYING ON A LOOP IN MY HEAD EVER SINCE.
Kill me now.
(Warning to those who did not grow up in the 1970s: If you Google “The Hustle” DO NOT LISTEN TO IT. It’s one of those ‘Wheels On The Bus’ songs that never ends. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
Smoky Robinson’s hit song “Tears of a Clown” sounds like a guy trying to get away with something. “I’m so bummed that you broke up with me. If you see me smiling that’s just me trying to cover up my feelings, I’m actually really sad. And if you see me having a good time at a party? That’s me just pretending. Honestly, I’m not enjoying myself at all, no matter how happy and carefree I look. Totally wrecked, that’s me.”
I’m a huge Star Trek fan from way back. I’ve watched every episode of the original series so many times that you can show me a two-second clip of any show and I can tell you which one it is. I stood in line outside the movie theater in freezing temps to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and when I finally got in and the lights went down I loved every long, tedious, boring minute of it (still do).
And I’ve been a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation from it’s rather uneven first season to its very enjoyable final season. While we were living overseas, my father used to tape our favorite shows and mail them to us, and we would fast-forward through them to binge-watch the episodes of ST:TNG. It was just a silly space opera but those characters grew on us like fast friends.
Which is why I really, really want to love Star Trek Picard, but I have to admit I don’t. I’m so disappointed by how bad it is. It is so bad.
The biggest disappointment is that they took a character I’ve really enjoyed watching through every chapter of his life and they made his final chapters so boring. I can’t get over how boring this series is. The pacing is so slow. It takes forever for any of the characters to say anything or do anything or figure anything out. They seem to struggle with everything. Every scene plods along so slowly that I feel like I want to get behind it and push. These should be compelling stories told in captivating dialogue, and instead they’re repellent and the dialogue is tired and empty. Doing this to a beloved character ought to be a crime.
From “The Joys of Yiddish” by Leo Rosten:
To help you distinguish kvitch from kvetch from krechtz (a salubrious set of niceties) I offer these observations:
You can kvitch sedately, charmingly, out of happiness; to kvetch is always negative, bilious, complaining; and to krechtz is to utter grating noises of physical discomfort or spiritual woe.
Kvitching may be hard on the ears, but kvetching is hard on the nerves. As for krechtzing, it should be reserved for a hospital room.
Some families produce personality types who are adept, even effusive, in their kvitching; other families specialize in kvetching — communal grousings drenched in self-pity; and some krechtz so loudly and so often that they sound like a convention of hypochondriacs.
If you take the trouble to familiarize yourself with the nuances of kvitching, kvetching, and krechtzing, you may zestfully add them to your arsenal of exclamatory locutions. Connoisseurs should enlist them for the relief of English words that are becoming exhausted from overwork.
This garbage heap of grammatical errors was a huge hit as a pop song in the 1980s:
Sometimes I never leave, but sometimes I would
Sometimes I stay too long, sometimes I would
Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes it would
Sometimes I’m all alone and wish that I could
Until suddenly last summer
And then suddenly last summer
If you never leave, that’s called “staying.” You do it continuously. You never stop not leaving. And because you’re always doing it, you are, in effect, doing it just once. You couldn’t do it “sometimes.” If you were “staying” only “sometimes,” you would, by definition, have to leave occasionally.
Which might be what she’s getting at when she adds, “but sometimes I would.” Okay, fine, but then it’s “but sometimes I do.” Either that or the first part is “Sometimes I’d never leave,” which also doesn’t make any sense but at the very least it’s in the right tense. Keep your tenses straight, dammit. Same goes for the second and third lines!
“Sometimes I stay too long” seems a little bit redundant after saying “sometimes I never leave,” don’t you think? I do.
Not sure what frightens her. Never leaving? Or the very redundant staying too long? Something else? Maybe she could be a little more vague? I’m not a huge fan of ambiguity when it comes to pop songs.
“Sometimes I’m all alone” is pretty straightforward, but I have absolutely no freakin clue what she wishes she could. Do. Can’t even take a wild-ass guess. Maybe I’m missing something obvious but I think it’s more likely she’s trying to be mysterious by writing something open-ended and obtuse. Not a fan of that, either.
Speaking of mysterious:
One summer never ends, one summer never began
It keeps me standing still, it takes all my will
And then suddenly last summer
I mean, come on. If it never began, how does it never end? How does that make sense at all? I’m flummoxed.
All that being said, I still like this song. It’s got a really good sound and it reminds me of my college years. What’s not to love about that?
We were watching the first episode of “The Last of Us” when my mom texted me. She was housebound because she’d been hit by the same deep freeze that was keeping all us inside, but for her it was worse: she lives in Arkansas where the road maintenance crews don’t go out to salt or sand the roads, so she was stuck at the end of her cul-de-sac, unable to go anywhere. We stayed in just because we didn’t like getting cold.
So she told me about the books she was reading and I told her about the zombie show we were watching. “The funny thing about zombie movies,” I texted her, “is that you have to pretend that everybody in the movie has never seen a zombie movie.”
“I have never seen a zombie movie,” she texted back, “and I hope I never do.”
So I guess it is possible, then, that in a zombie apocalypse there might be one or two people who didn’t realize what was going on. I stand corrected.
aw, shit.
It’s “come on, eileen tah loo rye yay,” not “come on, eileen tah roo lah ray.” I’ve been singing it wrong all these years. So embarrassing.
We got beat yesterday evening during our weekly game of Spirit Island, and by “we” I mean My Darling B and I. Tim did just fine defending his territory and he did what he could to help us protect ours. Winning the game is a group effort! So when B and I went down, we took Tim with us. Yay, team!
It’s a game of anti-colonization. Invaders explore the island, building towns and cities and blighting the land. Natives defend the island with the help of spirits, each of which have unique powers. My favorite spirits are Ocean’s Hungry Grasp and River Surges In Sunlight. Ocean is good at drowning invaders but can only get them if they’re near the coast. River is good at flooding the lands, which washes the invaders down to the shore where Ocean can get at them. That’s a pretty good example of how the game relies on teamwork.
I was playing Fractured Days Split The Sky, a spirit I had played only once before. It’s a spirit with very complex powers that frankly intimidated me so much I didn’t dream of playing it for the longest time, but I could tell from watching Tim play Fractured that it was a spirit with a lot of potential for helping out other spirits, so I wanted to learn how it worked.
I played Fractured Days last week and again last night and both times I felt like I was groping around in the dark with no chance of finding the light switch that turned on the big light bulb over my head, so I asked Tim for any hints he could give me that might help me learn how to make this spirit work. He pointed out that one of Fractured’s power cards, Blur The Arc Of Days, could be very useful for destroying invaders. He’d tried to point this out to me during the game but I was slow to pick up on it because to me, the power card seemed to be no more than a way to spawn and move the Dahan, which are the island natives we as spirits are supposed to be protecting.
The card also lets Fractured Days force invaders to ravage the lands. I didn’t see how that was helpful. Ravaging invaders can blight the island until the spirits gain the ability to defend against blight. Out of habit, I had trained myself to prevent the invaders from ravaging. Tim pointed out that after I acquired power to defend the land, I could destroy invaders by spawning Dahan, forcing the invaders to ravage, and protecting the Dahan from the ravage with my acquired defense, which allows the Dahan to fight back against the invaders, destroying them. Such a simple strategy that it completely evaded me. Now I wonder what other seemingly useless powers I’ve been overlooking.
We’re binge-watching the Showtime thriller crime series “Your Honor” and if you haven’t seen it yet stop reading right now because I’m going to spoil it in a big way.
The show stars Bryan Cranston as Michael Desiato, a judge in New Orleans, and Hunter Doohan as Adam, his son. Adam crashes his car into Benjamin Wadsworth playing the part of Rocco Baxter, the son of a crime boss. Don’t get too attached to him, he dies a grisly death in the first episode. When Adam tells Michael what happened, Michael takes Adam downtown with the intention of turning him over to the police, but when Michael learns that his son has killed the son of the crime boss, he slinks out of the precinct unnoticed and the craziness begins.
I was sort of into this show for the first five or six episodes. The first two episodes were about how Michael covered up the crime, how Adam suffered a full-blown crisis of conscience, and the next few episodes were about how the cover-up began to fall apart, but the last episode we watched last night was totally looney toons. To say they lost me is an understatement. In the final scenes, I was rooting for the bad guys, although to be absolutely fair by the end of the episode it was clear that Michael is just as awful as the mob boss he’s hiding from, and Adam is an apple that hasn’t fallen all that far from the tree.
While Adam was unraveling emotionally after killing Rocco, he attended a memorial for Rocco where he met Fia, Rocco’s sister. The next day, Adam “accidentally” ran into Fia in a coffee shop. He’s been stalking her on social media so it doesn’t feel all that accidental. She sat down with him and they began to chat. Adam told Fia his mother had been murdered. Fia told Adam her brother had been murdered. They bonded over their mutually shared anguish and left the cafe to spend the day together. They had good chemistry and looked adorable with each other. It was a really sweet date, or would have been if Adam hadn’t had to keep dodging the fact that he was the monster who ran over Fia’s brother and left him to die.
Later that night as Michael makes a sandwich, he tells Adam the heartwarming story of how me met Adam’s mother. Sorry, not heartwarming. I meant to say psychopathic. These two are psychopaths. Adam killed Rocco. He was spectacularly broken up about it until he started dating Rocco’s sister after e-stalking her. Now his heart is healed and he’s in love. Or something similarly warped. Meanwhile his dad, Michael, has done such a half-assed job of covering up Adam’s involvement in the murder that Rocco’s mob boss of a father is killing off everyone he thinks is responsible. And Michael knows it. But he’s in the kitchen telling his son stories of romance and eternal love. Totally psycho.
So when Rocco’s father, the mob boss, thought he had it figured out that Michael killed Rocco (and Michael let him think that) I wasn’t all that worried that Michael was going to get a bullet in the brain. I knew that wasn’t going to happen, of course, because there were four more episodes to go and the series has been renewed for a second season, so they weren’t going to kill off the star of the show. But I was kind of hoping they would anyway. And a little disappointed that they didn’t. Oh well.
In the two episodes we watched tonight, Adam is still dating Fia and they still look kind of cute together, but still in a really creepy way because Fia keeps mentioning her dead brother and Adam keeps tap-dancing around it by mentioning his dead mother. How does he think this is going to end? Happily ever after? Best-case scenario (for him) she never finds out until he’s telling his own “how I met your mother” story to their kids and it slips out that he ran her brother down in the street. Oopsie.
All that said, Bryan Cranston has gotten pretty good at playing a psychopathic monster. If you liked him in “Breaking Bad” you’ll like him in this. Same character, really.
Jonny Quest was my all-time favorite Saturday morning cartoon show, and why wouldn’t it be? Jonny was the son of Doctor Benton Quest, a man so smart that the CIA had him under twenty-four hour surveillance every day of the year to protect the secrets in his brain. He went to every corner of the earth to do science and, naturally enough, Jonny went with him and got into all sorts of adventures.
A show like that needed a great big television theme song, and Jonny Quest’s theme song was the best theme song in the history of television theme songs! It opened with a flourish of trumpets, followed by war drums that beat the beat of an excited heart for four measures before a bevy of trombones began to hammer out the base line of the song. There’s hardly been a theme song like it since then. Okay, maybe Hawaii Five-O came close, but it’ll always be in the number two slot.
This Is Drivel 