Based on the short stories of Phillip K. Dick and trying to fill the gap left by 'Black Mirror' which was swallowed up by the Americans waving lots of hard cash at Charlie Brooker. *g*

What did I think of it so far? I think this Guardian article sums it up for me....

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/18/electric-dreams-the-hood-maker-review-will-make-you-want-to-take-a-look-in-the-black-mirror

"Captivating performances, from Richard Madden from Game of Thrones, and from Holliday Grainger, who’s actually clashing with herself over on BBC1, though she’s hardly recognisable as Robin, the well-groomed, wholesome PA/wannabe PI in Strike. Here she looks more like someone you’d bump into in the stranger fields on the fringes of Glastonbury.

That’s what’s right with Electric Dreams, the first episode, at least. Are there any problems? Two, the seriousness of which I’m not sure. First, it’s not Black Mirror. To which you might say: so what, who says it’s trying to be? But when you have two ambitious sci-fi anthology series about who we are and where we’re going, comparison is inevitable, especially since the new one now occupies the old home of the other. It’s like when you’re going out with someone, and then they leave you (for someone with more money), and you get a new someone, and they’re great, but you can’t help thinking about the old one, missing them…

Actually, it’s not really like that, unless you are Channel 4 I imagine. The rest of us can obviously just spend £5.99 on Netflix to get the old one back. But if you could just have one, then you’d obviously pick the old one. Because while ED may resonate, BM hits an actual nerve, and hurts. Not so much about an imagined future, it’s about now, or no more than five minutes from now. It’s sci-fi for the non-sci-fi fan. And it’s more human, more moving, and wittier. Better, in short. And that brings us to the second – and I think more serious – issue with Electric Dreams. Which has to do with quality and consistency. The Hood Maker is terrific, thoughtful, thought-provoking and compelling. I’ve seen a couple more episodes, though, and without going into detail or giving anything away, they’re simply less engaging."

Netflix movie ( The Deep Blue Sea )

A quiet week in the neighborhood except for the car that ran into a house across the way. The other night about 2AM, I was about to turn off my light and go to sleep and I heard a thump, not a crash but more like when the garbage truck empties a dumpster. Then a guy is yelling, and I’m thinking it’s some kind of domestic fight. And he yells for a long time and after a while there’s cops and firefighters, and looking out the window I see a car up against a house. I live in a mobile home park and there’s a lane between houses that lets two cars pass. This car was on the wrong side of the road. Perhaps a little too much happy juice. The next morning I could see that a real job had been done on the house’s skirting. The owners have only restricted access for safety. That’s the third time a car has run into a house since I lived here.


I finished a book, And Furthermore by Judi Dench. Lots of anecdotes, nothing too deep but enjoyable. She had a fine time, thank you very much. She didn’t mention my favorite movie of hers, On Giant’s Shoulders which was actually a BBC play of the week. I have no recollection how I came across it.

I realized I saw her in a play, The Gay Lord Quex. I’d tell you how many years ago but I don’t want to scare you. I don’t remember her only Daniel Massey.


Meme:; Kitchen, favorite comfort food.

Well, my mother wasn’t a good cook, neither was my childhood home a place of comfort. So I don’t have any memories to go to.

But I’m not a good cook either but most any kind of pasta makes me happy.

I have a list.  I have heaps.  I have packing cubes.  Somehow I have to combine all of these and make sure I don't forget anything.

I am going to be spending 11 days doing sailing, swimming, windsurfing, cycling and possibly stuff like yoga.  I've packed a lot of PE and swimming kit.  I have not yet packed the non PE type stuff and I'm wondering just how respectable I need to look when I'm not sailing, swimming, windsurfing or cycling.

Tomorrow I shall try and get it all into my luggage.  

I need to not forget the suncream, which is not currently on the list.

The only not so bright spot in all of this is the 5.40am departure from Gatwick.  I'm really not a morning person.  

Yes, it turns out. Yes I can.

Finally, after over a month of arguing with our former provider (and waiting for our new provider to send out an engineer), we have internet! Huzzah!

It's been a long and boring month and a half - no TV, no Netflix or Prime, no reddit to while away the hours, and certainly no AO3.

Well, perhaps boring is a little unfair. I have spent that time working my way through all the unread books languishing on my new shelves (Ikea's finest - well, second crappest - the move was an entirely too expensive affair). Some were excellent, some meh, and one really rather dire. But you live and learn. Or read and learn, as the case may be.

Currently, I'm reading my way through the the Doctor Who New Adventures series. Or the ones I can get my grubby little mitts on, at any rate - which turns out to be Love and War, No Future, Set Piece, Human Nature, and Damaged Goods. Just finished Love and War (which was fantastic. Ugly, but fantastic), and No Future (angst and double crossing central!).

The Seventh Doctor is rapidly becoming my favourite (a position previously held by the Fourth), manipulative git that he is. I'm also finding the more I read stories featuring Bernice, the more I'm warming to her as a character. Though I highly doubt she will replace Ace as my favourite companion for Seven, I'm certainly enjoying her adventures through time and space.

As of this evening, I'm about half way through Human Nature, which I am enjoying immensely. Having seen the New Who adaptation with Ten (Human Nature/Family of Blood) and thoroughly enjoyed it at the time, I was a little dubious at first. But oh my, it works so much better as a Seventh Doctor story. I'm really enjoying the way it picks apart what the Doctor is and what he very much isn't (but what else was it going to do, being written by Paul Cornell? Picking apart characters and pushing them to their extremes seems to be his raison d'etre). And John Smith in a Seventh Doctor mould is so unbearably sweet I almost can't stand it. Almost.

Am very much looking forward to seeing how it ends. Though I suspect it's going to break my heart, just like Love and War.

We shall see.

In the last few days, I have looked at getting on for 500 slides.  I've finally found the box that has me as a tiny baby in.  There are far more pics of Bro as a small and I was beginning to get a complex.  

There are probably more somewhere, but I think there are about 800 in total including the 2 boxes I've had sitting on my desk for some years.  I need to work out whether we want prints of any of them.  I also need to get them back into some better order.  I know that there are some from different sets in separate boxes, which need to be reunited with the rest of their own series.  At least cataloguing them means it's easier to resort them.

This is in addition to the approximately 1200 b&w negatives that date from about 1948 - 1968.

I recognise some people and can guess at others, but there are a few who I have no idea about - mostly university and TA related pics.  It's very interesting to see the photos of Very Small Us with Granny & Grandpa. 

See icon.

Anyway, so Hurricane Irma happened. I spent several days at my friends' house, being nervous (before the storm) and exhausted (after the storm). The power went out Sunday night as the winds began to howl overhead. Luckily Monday, after the storm had passed, was breezy and relatively nice even without power, and when I went home Tuesday morning, my power was restored.

But that's luck.

I live in a Tree City, and everywhere old oaks lie cracked in yards or near roadways. The neighbors behind me never do treework at all despite a yard full of aged water oaks, and as in Matthew last year, half of one of the oaks fell on my back fence. La la la.

No, seriously, la la la, because my neighbor across the street (who also doesn't have tree work done) had HER giant oak snap off near the roots, and it rests partially on her house. She is staying with church friends, possibly for a long time.

Master Danger and I are back to almost normal, except for the hum of generators nearby and roads unexpectedly closed by trees and a few local shops still not blessed with power. My current project is to buy a new mattress, because after last week's hotel stays and the weekend's stay at my friends', the inadequacy of my own bed is making itself felt. OUCH.

May you only have the best of breezes this week!

I've been sleeping better recently, which means I'm generally much livelier and not so grumpy during the day.  But the way the nights are drawing in means my hibernation genes are kicking in.  I got home from Jado around 8.30, ate my McDeadthings, hung up the laundry, got changed and flopped on the sofa to read email and listen to Jo Wiley.  It's not 10pm yet, but I'm ready to hit the hay.

I should be doing things like sorting travel insurance and currency, but I think I'm going to go to bed and play on my tablet for a while, then get some kip.   

Title: Mother-ish
Author: punch_kicker15
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: BtVS
Characters/Relationships: Joyce, slight Willow/Tara
Summary: Tara's thoughts about Joyce, during Buffy vs. Dracula
Word count: 172

 

 

The package I was waiting for from Amazon has been delivered to "the mail room". There is NO mail room" here. Yesterday they managed to find my house to deliver something to my actual house but today a mail room has suddenly appeared and is accepting packages. How? Why? There is not even a whisper of a mail room in my vicinity. I am perplexed, nonplussed even.

Another couple of days spent rooting through the stuff in Pa's house and extracting the bits worth keeping.  Yesterday Bro and I started on Pa's bedroom.  Between us, we probably put in 12-14 hrs of time.  Pa's bedroom is maybe 11' x 9, with a built in wardrobe along one of the short walls.  Apart from a rail of clothes the complete width of the room, there was a shelf full of stuff above the rail and a stack 2 to 3 high of crates and boxes all the way along underneath the clothes.  There were several references to Narnia as I disappeared inside to haul things out.  At one point I collapsed in a fit of hysterical laughter about something, probably to do with camels.

This last few weeks is the longest Bro and I have spent in each other's exclusive company for a very long time and it's been nice just to get back to our old sense of humour.  Our childhood was much influenced by the Goons and Flanders & Swann and all the assorted TV shows from the late 60s onwards and those are the things that will still crack us up.

Before we got to the wardrobe, we cleared enough space to move the bed against the wall.  Then I worked through the contents of the chest of drawers in front of one of the wardrobe doors.  

Amongst the haul from the drawers were:

• a wallet from his student days including several letters from his room mate, his student union card, a receipt from the caterers for a hall party, a receipt for his (plain) monocle, several payslips from a holiday job and a letter from a female who was clearly less taken with him than he with her!
• a wallet from after his student days including 2 photos of Ma, a letter from his mother dated just after we'd been to visit in 1975, several assorted business cards and a receipt from a hotel where he & Ma stayed for 3 days in February 1962 (married for more than 3 years at this point), which Bro thinks may be a significant moment in *his* existence!!!
• An old passport of Grandpa's from 1959 onwards.
• An old passport for Grandpa's parents dated 1929.  Both Grandpa and his father were railway agents and traveled extensively on the continent. This contains only the third photo I've ever seen of my great grandmother.
• A bag of lead soldiers that are clearly pre-WW1 and therefore probably Grandpa's
• A pocket watch - probably Grandpa's
• A box of assorted cap badges and uniform badges/patches/pips etc from assorted uniforms that would have belonged to both Pa and Grandpa
• A large quantity of assorted old coins - UK and foreign
• A large quantity of assorted decimal coins of various ages, including 20 or more pound coins
• A quantity of assorted UK bank notes - all now defunct but interesting for collecting.  
• A receipt for the burial of Ma's grandfather, who was interred in Keighley cemetary on 10 September 1935.  Ma was born on 9 October.

Amongst the other things we found were

• Grandpa's beret and forage cap as seen in assorted war time photos.
• A photo of Grandpa's unit in Italy at Christmas 1943
• A photo of Grandpa's cricket team either just before or just after the war
• A 14" bayonet 
• Pa's stamp album with a pretty darn good collection of stamps - including several with the pre-War German Chancellor and one wartime German field post stamp.
• A copy of  "The Efficient Use of Fuel" which was awarded to Pa in 1953 for "The Headmaster's Prize for Work of Special Merit" in his last year at school.

and many other things that are equally interesting and a whole heap more things that have been earmarked for disposal.  Bro messaged me as I was driving home to say he had finally found Pa's  blues uniform, which hung in the wardrobe in my bedroom all the time I lived at home. 

I found some marbles, which were probably Bro's, but then found a large bag of marbles which were definitely Pa's.  Much hilarity ensued as we discussed whether giving him his marbles back would improve his current situation.

I have brought back another car load of stuff and am continuing to sift and sort it so it can be catalogued and shared with the cousins.

Okay, I went humorous with the title, but it wasn't funny. I make up Drunken Noodles and the oil in the jalapenos got into the air and triggered an asthma attack in my roommate. I knew perfume set her off but certainly had no way to predict this would. I've made the recipe here before without problems. I don't recall if she was out of town when I did. I know I used some other kind of pepper so maybe that made the difference.

In future, at least while I'm Kat's roommate, I'll be adding dried jalapenos after I take the dish off the heat.

Netflix movie ( And Everything is Going Well )

A little bit of that meme going around.

Bedroom: what’s your sleep schedule?
I’m plagued with more insomnia than I used to be. But since I’m retired it doesn’t much matter when I sleep. When I was working, I asked my doctor for a sleeping pill and used one when my mind wouldn’t turn off. She gave 15 pills and they lasted about 3 months, so you see it wasn’t an addiction. Just an assurance I’d get some sleep and not murder anybody at work, because, god, they could be annoying.

The last few months I’ve been watching Time Team episodes, a British anthropology tv series, on youtube just before I go to sleep. I’ve cycled through them a few times but I find them soothing.

Sometimes a cat will join me at bedtime, sometimes not.

You know, if the South wanted to replace those statutes that deserve to be trashcanned, they could put people like this guy


Shall we discuss what we will watch on tv? I don’t have cable, just an antenna. There’s a channel called “Escape” that has cop and crime reenactment shows that I have on for background a lot.

Sunday
The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, Ghosted (maybe), PBS Masterpiece, Elementary whenever they deign to show it.

Monday
PBS mysteries

Tuesday
Once again, the only two shows I want to watch are against each other. The Mayor and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. A little channel switching during commercials

Wednesday
PBS mysteries, The Good Place (I’ve seen two different dates and times for this. Network might bounce it around. That’s always fun.)

Thursday
Nothing

Friday
PBS mysteries

Saturday
Movie night

Right now PBS is showing Dickensian, which is nothing more than Dickens fanfic. Yes, it is. What if many of Dickens’ characters interacted? Like Scrooge and Miss Haversham and Fagin? What if Marley was murdered? Who killed him? Hmmmmmmmm? I’m enjoying it.