lyric
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.
entertainment
fractured
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.
your honor
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.
best television theme song
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.
Casablanca
Tonight’s after-dinner entertainment was “Casablanca,” the corniest of cornball movies and yet still so wonderfully enjoyable. The first time I saw it on the big screen was while I was in college; the audience cheered after every well-worn quote. We didn’t cheer tonight but we did recite our favorite quotes along with the actors as they recited them, and sang long every time “La Marseillaise” was played, which was pretty much from the beginning to the end of the movie. So much fun.
year’s best
I’ve been collecting editions of “The Year’s Best Science Fiction” for I don’t know how long. Wait, yes I do. I’ve been collecting them since I was a teenager, but those copies are long gone. I started collecting the editions on my bedroom bookshelf ever since I noticed them for sale at the local Half Price Books store, about 15 years ago.
I don’t usually read them cover-to-cover. I used to do that, when I bought each edition as soon as it was published, because I had a whole year to read each book and I was a voracious sci-fi reader. Now I’m more of a casual reader of fantasy and science fiction, as the genre has come to be known, and a little pickier than I used to be. If a story doesn’t hold my interest, I won’t finish it. And because I’ve got more than twenty editions on hand and each book is about 700 pages long, I tend to look for stories by writers I already know, read those, then put the book up on the shelf.
But that approach doesn’t expose me to new writers or new ideas, does it? No, it doesn’t. So what I started doing last year is choosing the latest edition from the shelf and reading it from cover to cover. First thing I noticed when I started doing that: Wow, there are a lot of stories in these “year’s best” anthologies that just aren’t. The best, I mean. Sure, picking the “best” is a judgment call on the part of the editor, and this particular editor had a pretty good track record for satisfying my fiction needs, but he picked a lot of stinkers, too, stories I read all the way through with a furrowed brow and, when I got to the end, asked myself, “That’s it? That’s how it ends? What the fuck?”
To be fair, there are more hits than misses, and since I began doing the cover-to-cover thing I’ve discovered lots of writers I’d never known before that I want to read more of now, so on the whole it’s a win. If I want to get through them all, however, I’ll have to step up my game. I finished the two latest editions last year and I have more than twenty on the shelf. Working backward at this rate, I won’t finish the oldest edition (currently the 8th annual collection, but I might find older editions if I start haunting the book store again) until after my 72nd birthday.
blighted
Scotland Six kicked our butts! Tim picked the adversary for our game of Spirit Island last night. He likes a challenge, so he picked one of the tougher adversaries (in this case, Scotland — the adversaries are named for 19th-century countries or dynasties) and he dialed it all the way up to the most difficult setting (1 being the easiest, 6 being the most punishing). The game board is an island divided into six smaller boards, one for each spirit, and each spirit’s board is subdivided into lands named for their most prominent characteristic (mountains, jungle, wetlands). Spirits protect the island from encroaching invaders using magical powers which strengthen and multiply as the game progresses, but invaders can get a jump on the spirits by giving them the advantages of a particular adversary. The adversary Tim chose last night, for instance, can build lots and lots of towns under certain conditions. And build they did, all over one of the boards I was supposed to protect, while my spirit was still young and not very powerful. In other words, I got swamped early on and never recovered, even though other spirits tried to help me. In the final battle, all our spirits were overwhelmed by the blight which invaders bring to the island. We went down fighting, though.
knives out
Last night we watched “Knives Out” for the second time and I have to say I think I liked it even better this time around. I wasn’t paying close attention to how detective Benoit Blanc solved the murder mystery last time so that part of the story went right over my head. I was paying attention this time and seeing how the clues all fit together was really quite satisfying. But it was watching the performances that I enjoyed most. I can’t think of a single wrong note in any one of their performances; they all brought their A game to the show, and appeared to be having a great time doing it. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this movie again ever since watching “The Glass Onion” last week, which we both enjoyed as much, if not more, than “Knives Out.”
hudsons
Kate Hudson acquitted herself admirably on Hot Ones. See for yourself:
On a related note: I was today years old when I learned that Kate Hudson’s mother is Goldie Hawn, and her father is Bill Hudson. I, who came of age in the 70s, was not only familiar with Goldie from Rowen & Martin’s Laugh-In, but was also lucky enough to experience The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show.
the horse
I was in all the bands during high school, by which I mean, there was just one band, but it was sort of an all-purpose band: marching band, pep band, concert band. When we played at basketball games or other sporting events, we were known as the pep band and we played high-tempo tunes that were arranged to be fast and short.
One of those tunes was “The Horse.” I loved that tune because 1) it sounded amazeballs, and because 2) my part was stupid easy to play. This is what it sounded like when it was arranged for a marching band:
And I was today years old when I learned that it’s not only an R&B number from way back, but it’s also got words!
This Is Drivel 