SmithW6079

I'm currently reading one of the Judge Dee mysteries. Judge Dee is a Chinese magistrate during the Tang Dynasty who solves crimes. I first read about the character a number of years ago. This version of the character was created by Robert Hans van Gulik in the 1950s; apparently there was a historic Judge Dee. Van Gulik spent most of his life in East Asia as a Dutch diplomat and scholar of Asia. I went through all the books in my local library & discovered a few more through library's e-collection. There are about three mysteries per novel, most times occurring simultaneously (Judge Dee can, apparently, multitask, given that he has three wives). They're interesting reads. I've also read several books of science fiction by Chinese authors, mostly short stories. There's a lyrical quality about many of them that I don't think you find in Western sci-fi. An author I especially like is Ted Chiang, a Chinese-American author whose short story "Story of Your Life" became the movie "Arrival." I also loved his collection "Exhalation: Stories." The novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is especially haunting.

Better get out the tissues now. 🤧

Wait, what?! I always pictured the piggy going to market because he's going shopping for food, not as food. My childhood is ruined!

I loved his alt-Byzantium books and his alt-Moorish Spain one. The latter was really heartrending.

If you read sci-fi and alternate history and depending on your feeling about SM Stirling and his Draka series (in which the Tories, after the American Revolution, move to South Africa and establish a crown colony there, where slavery is still practiced into the 20th century), the books include several appendixes in which he goes into a lot of detail about Drakan society, from government to economy to technology.

Which does not mean the character needs to be a Mary Sue. I never saw this as David's story exclusively. It was an ensemble from the beginning.

Scarlett might feel bad about the things she does, but she still makes the decision to do them. And I'm not convinced she feels bad about, say, hiring convicts and working them almost to death (until she realizes Gallagher is stealing from her, and that's more about money than concern for their welfare). She's forever holding herself up to the ideals of Ellen, but consciously chooses not to act upon those ideals. Of course, Ellen and Gerald would be like Ashley and Melanie, beat down by the Confederacy's defeat and unable to navigate the brave new world like Rhett and Scarlett and some of the other characters who are finding ways to survive and thrive during Reconstruction. To be fair, that was the mentality of the time. The "heroes" of the book, including Frank Kennedy, Ashley Wilkes, Doctor Meade, and others are members of the Ku Klux Klan and are frequently derogatory to Black people. Rhett himself kills a Black man who was "disrespectful" to a white woman. Mitchell writes in the book about how it was the women of the Confederacy who were the most passionate about the Confederacy (we see this in Melanie), while the men, having lost the war, wanted to return to their lives. It was the Daughters of the Confederacy who formulated and prompted the "Lost Cause" myth. How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history It was after I read "Gone With the Wind" that I was on an antebellum South/Civil War kick for a while (at the time, I bought into the whole Lost Cause myth without realizing that's what it was called). There was a book series (maybe a trilogy, maybe more) about a southern family. I can't remember the name of the books, but I remember there was a character named Bruce who was born with a harelip. She was the daughter of one of the characters and got her name because he really wanted a child named "Bruce" (as I recall). Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Not at all.

Chris Elliott looks like creepy pedophile & serial killer living in his mom's basement or the shed out back.

Progressive ads are hit and miss for me. I loved the Zoom meeting ones during the pandemic, but the ones that feature Jamie in some kind of fantasy are awful, and I especially hated him in the test drive commercial. Is that a thing? I've never ridden in my car with an insurance representative. Also, he was out of character by being so self-absorbed. I could see if it was Mara (she's the nasally, whiny one, right?).

Damn this show for making me cry almost every episode. I loved Art's talk with his wife at the end and saying that he met someone and basically asking her permission to date again. They said she died about 10 or 12 years ago? Don't they know for sure? If it was 10 years ago, I'm thinking that maybe Art's willingness to maybe go on a date might be tied to that anniversary. I like that Al isn't willing to give up his religious beliefs just to fit in in America. It's strikes me that this entire family is hurting in some way, and while they might kid around with each other, they're also there for each other. I would love to see Riley go to a veterans' PTSD group and try to work through his issues. The military has been making great strides since OIF & OEF to address mental health (what they call "behavioral health") issues related to multiple deployments in combat. Still don't like the kid, and I thought she was really obnoxious to push herself into her aunt's personal life. She's 10 years old; it's not her business, and I thought less of her mother for giving in immediately to the kid's threat to keep nagging. She's your daughter not your girlfriend; act like her mother. Al has the right idea about how children should behave to their parents.

I just finished "Artemis," the second book by Andy Weir (he just came out with his third, I think). I really liked "The Martian," but I had heard mixed reviews about this one. I liked the world building he did for the lunar city, but the story is uneven, the main character not all that likable, and the "epilogue" seems a little farfetched. He also includes an appendix, which is an essay on how the lunar economy would work. I love it when we can learn more about the fictional society, even if everything isn't used.

Good one.🤣🤣 Harry's "job" is to be the Duke of Sussex for the company he "works" for.

One does what one must to get back in the will.

The Google commercial with the hearing son and the deaf parents. While it's all-around heartwarming, it's the actor's line reading of this, and I can't quite explain why: "My parents were born deaf. I was not." Maybe it's the matter-of-fact way he states it before explaining how he would translate for them.

I'm not a fan of Hazel; maybe it's the little actress I don't care for. I find it a little hard to believe that with Art and Riley being who they are that they would let her get away with a lot of the comments she makes. Maybe it's guilt on Riley's part for being in the service and away from home so many times, and just indulgence on Art's part. The car-buying episode was the first one that didn't make me cry, but I felt for Riley at the end, admitting to his sister that he didn't understand the financing on his truck. A joke I've seen often on satirical military sites like Duffel Blog is that young guys in the service often buy muscle cars at exorbitant financing from crooked dealers near bases (that, and marry the first strippers who are nice to them). It made me wonder about the timeline though. Riley says he enlisted at 18, right out of high school, and I presume he's supposed to be in his late 20s/early 30s (Parker Young is 32), so he was in for at least 10-15 years, and Riley was relatively recently discharged (maybe a year or two). Hazel is how old again? I don't remember from the birthday episode. I guess he married his wife young and had a child in his very early 20s and was frequently deployed and away from home. In the Afghanistan bakery episode, while I figured there would be backlash when Al's role with the US military came out, I thought it was going to be the father, but we never saw him again. While I agree with the posters above who mentioned that the daughter must have learned some of her attitudes toward the US invasion from her father, it would have been interesting to find out why he left the country and when. I like that this show isn't shying away from complicated issues with multiple facets. I do wish they had made the wife's new boyfriend less of a hippie-dippie, though. How much more threatened would Riley have been with a man much like him, just not a veteran? Would them bonding make the whole relationships so much more confusing and convoluted? Maybe because I work with veterans, but it makes me cringe every time some civilian pulls the "I would have joined but..." (I'm not a veteran, and I wouldn't think of saying that to one of our vets). Someone mentioned that Lizzie is wasting her life, but I don't think so, really. She's still grieving the loss of her fiancé, and in the first few episodes, we're given the impression that she was getting drunk every night and having sex with strangers. But since then, we've seen that she works for her father's construction company (probably as the controller or office manager) and she appears to be both finance-savvy and artistically inclined. I wonder if future episodes will deal with her meeting someone she could fall for and feeling guilty that she was cheating on her dead fiancé (which ends with a heartwarming speech by Dad or Riley or Al that Michael would want her to move on with her life). I have rarely liked a new sitcom from the get-go, but the first episode/pilot got me hooked immediately.

I agree with most of your points (although I have laughed at Robot Chicken in the past & I love time travel stories precisely because they're so convoluted and confusing). I don't read comic books, so I don't know M.O.D.O.K.'s backstory. Is he a legitimate villain or is he supposed to be comic relief? I binge-watched the episodes, so it got to be a little too much all at once.

Is part of a 12-step program personal growth? Because I don't think these characters grew at all. Bonnie told us she did, but she didn't really. Even Adam's cancer diagnosis was all about her. Sure, Jill didn't freak out because her hasty, City Hall wedding was disrupted by the battling boozos, but she's still going back to her humongous house to live her overprivileged lifestyle. Only now, she'll have a husband (for a few years) and a baby forever (well, the nannies will). Marjorie was already wise, so I guess her making up with her son was her growth? Except that the ball was in his court because she had expressed that desire for years. Did Wendy grow? If anything, she did some backsliding when she started hooking up with a man she knew was married who ended up dumping her. That would have been better handled if she dumped him once she found out he was married. I supposed Tammy ended up being the "star" of the past two seasons. We saw her overcome her anger issues, forgive the woman who was responsible for the path that led her to jail, worked the program, and eventually started her own business. I would have preferred if she had gone on her own rather than with leech Bonnie, but I suppose that couldn't be helped, since we had to be told Bonnie was good at something other than scamming people (like she did with her job as the apartment manager).

I didn't think much of this show, but I ended up watching it either on demand or through Hulu. There were parts I liked and a lot I didn't, which I hope they address or fix in season 2. I don't buy the potential romance between Kat and Max. If they go that route, that means they'll have to get rid of her current boyfriend, which probably means he'll end up dumping her so she can be the victim that Max needs to go rescue. I don't like that they put the two "ethnic" characters in a romance because why? Just because they're Black? I never much cared for Randi and the whole storyline of her dick of a boyfriend was just a waste. Was it just so they could set up her as Kat's roommate (presumably temporarily, given that Kat's apartment is a one-bedroom)? I also think they vastly overestimated the appeal of Leslie Jordan. I like him -- I remember going to see one of his one-man shows many years ago off-Broadway, but a little of him goes a long way. I probably won't set my DVR for the show, but when it comes back, I'll probably watch it. Not the most ringing endorsement. :-)

Because he's the Fonz! Aaayyyyyyy!👍

That's what he gets for badmouthing Verizon when he switched to Sprint. 😃

I turned it off about 10 minutes in. I don't like the Rogu character. I don't find him funny at all. In fact, it creeps me out.

I would assume they live on a neighborhood around other Nigerian immigrants. Isn't their church primarily Nigerians?

Because it's all about Bonnie. Always. Even her share at the end was all about how great she was for thinking about others.

I thought Abishola expressed to Bob that when they were married, that also meant Olu and Tunde would also be moving in.