• Tag Archives television

  • A Serial Watcher

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                     Beltane Moon

    A gorgeous day.  Sun, warm.  Daffodils in bloom.  Bees buzzing in the orchard.  Dogs playing in the woods.  Kate’s on her way home.  

    Ruthie told Kate she was her favorite grandma.  I told her she was my favorite grandma, too.  She’s coming back a happy gal.

    During the grey cold days of the weekend I did something I’ve not done before.  I wrote here sometime ago quitting Comcast cable tv.  Too damn expensive and a time suck.  In it’s place we have dvds, netflix and hulu.  Hulu (and Netflix, too for that matter) has whole TV series from beginning to end.  For instance, it has the entire Battlestar Galactica Sci-Fi channel series.  And many others.

     

    That means you can do what I did on Saturday and Sunday.  I found a new series, Grimm, that tells the story of a descendant of the fairy-tale compiler.  Turns out the Grimms can see and hunt all manner of thought-to-be imaginary creatures like the big bad wolf, pied piper and a whole menagerie of others.

    So I watched 1-12 of an 18 episode run.  That’s the thing I haven’t done before.  You can watch TV serials as if they are, in a sense, a video novel with each episode as a chapter.  Now I wouldn’t defend this as a way to increase your brain power, might have killed a few gray cells, but it sure was fun.  Felt very decadent though.


    📂This entry was posted in Family GeekWorld Media 📎and tagged

  • Leaving Us, June Cleaver

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                          Waxing Harvest Moon

    That ol’ harvest moon has swollen past a half and has Jupiter as a pendant.  The jewelry that adorns our night makes the homogeneous light of day seem dull, unimaginative.

    Two more signs of approaching old age:  June Cleaver dies at age 94.  Mr. Cunningham from Happy Days dies at age 83.  Oh, my.  Say it ain’t so, Beav.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging 📎and tagged

  • Declutter, Week 2

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                  Waning Green Corn Moon

    The declutter project has legs.  In addition to the potting bench moved outside last week, we have now cleared out the new food storage/work bench area.  In it we have a six shelf rack for storing such garden items as garlic, onions, apples, pears, squash.  We also have a Swedish shelving system, wood, that will hold additional food storage, perhaps canned and dried foods along with vegetables or fruits that the rack cannot handle.

    Just outside the food storage we have a small cupboard that now holds power tools underneath and on top our food dryer. We need a sand storage container, too, for root crops like potatoes, carrots, turnips and parsnips.  Kate worked very hard today, as she always does.

    We had an old, non-functional television that needed to get removed from the area.  I could not lift it.  It was too heavy and too wide for a good grip.  So, I took it apart.  It felt like sacrilege, cracking the circuit boards, cutting wires and lifting a heavy copper electrical device off the cathode ray tube.  After the television was in pieces I picked up the tube and stumbled up the stairs with it.  It was heavy, but at least I could cradle it in my arms.

    At one point my balance got wonky and I almost teetered over backward with the tube then ready to land on me.  When the guy at the recycling picked it up and put it on the scale, I asked  him how much it weighed, “78 pounds.”   “Geez,” I said, “It seemed heavier than that when I carried up the stairs.”  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m tired and it felt heavier than that to me, too.”  It cost $32 to have them take the tv off our hands.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • It Will End as a Novel Ends

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    55  bar steep rise 0mph E dew-point 39  Beltane

               Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

    Kate cleared a bunch of dogwood canes, pulled up weeds, pruned out a juniper (yesterday), deadheaded the daffodils and generally worked herself into a stupor. (In Norwegian, this is a good thing.)  She’s been on vacation this week and has enjoyed herself immensely planting, pruning, carrying.  (Again, in Norwegian, this constitutes a vacation.)  I admire and appreciate her doggedness, but it doesn’t count as a vacation attitude in my Celtic/Germanic perspective.   Whatever turns your crank.

    Battlestar Galactica is the most nuanced and unpredictable show on television, bar none.  It is a good science fiction novel brought to the screen and that is so rare as to be a marvel, a marvel that continues week after week.  There no good guys and bad guys, no bad robots and good robots.  No, there are humans and robots who, in some situations, act for the common good and, in other situations, act out of selfish or malicious motives. 

    The Science Fiction channel will finish the Battlestar Galactica series this season, but it will not tail off into the land of unfinished television shows. It will end as a novel ends, with an ending that ties together various plotlines and provides a final surprise and aha.  How do I know?  Because that’s how good writing works, and this is good writing.  I would like to see this as a precedent for TV shows where the story has a trajectory, a climax and a denouement, not the eternal extension of the storyline in a cynical attempt to exploit viewer interest for every last drop of advertiser revenue.  Viewers will return if the fiction has characters with complex lives, difficult hurdles to overcome and a convincing fate.

    More work outside tomorrow.  This may be the last big push for a while since Kate goes back to work on Tuesday and I have MIA and a docent class luncheon on Monday with Woolly’s in the evening.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Family 📎and tagged