His Dark Watchmen
All I have to report on today about last night, really, is television I watched. Well, I guess I could mention I walked home via another drop-by at the Capitol Hill branch library, where I picked up an older greatest-hits collection of Whitney Houston. I had picked up another, longer collection released a bit later several weeks ago, and was disappointed to find literally all the more upbeat songs included were remixes. What the hell? I want the original mixes! I don't own any Whitney Houston albums otherwise but I thought I might like to have a collection of her many hit singles. The CD is at home now but I still haven't gotten around to burning it to my computer.
Anyway, Shobhit made a rice and vegetable dish and he made me two very delicious parathas that he made putting slices of gouda cheese in their centers. It was a rather delicious, if rather American, innovation on the flatbread. I only ate one last night so I could take the other for lunch with me to work today.
We watched Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and his main story was about voting systems across the country and their susceptibility to hacking. The level of carelessness on the part of Congress, not at all only limited to their current terms but literally going back decades, is both frightening and depressing. It really dampened a lot of the hopes about next year's presidential election. Also, it's stunning to me how many people still believe President Fuckwit is fit to be in that role, let alone on any level a decent human being, and that his roughly 35-40% approval rating across the country has remained fairly constant over the past three years. What reason would anyone have to expect that to change even in the face of hard evidence against him surely to come out during public impeachment hearings? This country is full of fucking morons. "Some of them are in your extended family," Shobhit said, and he is not wrong. To be fair, just in terms of sheer numbers, that could easily be said about any single one of us Americans who aren't morons. To think my extended family would be immune to this would itself be moronic, really.
I made us chai, this time replacing regular sugar with the pumpkin spice syrup I've had as a work sample at home for months. It made for a fairly tasty "pumpkin spice chai," but it also seemed to take about double the volume typically used of regular sugar to get the same level of sweetness as well as any semblance of an actual "pumpkin spice" flavor, so I'm not sure it was worth the heap of extra calories it no doubt had.
Shobhit started the pilot episode of HBO's His Dark Materials, and I wound up finishing it with him. It was all right, but I am intrigued to see more. So I guess we're watching that show now.
After that, I retired to the bedroom to watch this week's episode 3 of HBO's Watchmen, which was spectacular, and really jumped the show into high gear. I even told Shobhit, "That was one spectacular hour of television," and then he asked which episode it was, perhaps suggesting he might give it another chance. The large focus on racial tensions in the pilot episode that turned him off at first is not nearly as directly focused on as the show goes on—I mean, it's certainly an essential part of the entire overall plot arc, but subsequent episodes get much more into both world building and character building. And, critically, this third episode, thanks pretty much entirely to the introduction of the amazing Jean Smart, is fucking hilarious.
There was not nearly as much humor in the pilot, for understandable reasons, as it starts with the long-ignored and factual events of the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in so doing igniting a national conversation about the event on a genuinely unprecedented scale. As the show moves further away from an acute focus on that one event, though, it makes room for, if not exactly "lighter," certainly funnier stuff. Jean Smart in particular singlehandedly made me committed to watching the season through to the end.
In addition to her, though, this third episode is much more comfortably set in an established and understood world, which the first episode just drops you into with very little context, especially if you've never read the original comic book series from the 1980s that this show is basically a direct sequel to. And it has been very helpful to listen to podcasts with people explaining a lot of things, who certain characters are and how they are related to massive, history-changing events that happened in this world, where the U.S. won the Vietnam War, Vietnam is actually a U.S. state, presidents have no term limits, and the Cold War ended in the eighties thanks to a manufactured "alien squid attack" on New York that claimed three million lives. These are all direct references to events of the original comic—but, without any knowledge of it, you would be even more confused by, say, occasional raining of tiny little squids (which the show still has not explained, but if you know about the comic, then at least you understand the choice of species). Also, the introduction of Jean Smart as Laurie Blake makes her the first actor depicting a character who was also in the original comic book. She's an FBI agent who apparently once dated Dr. Manhattan. Who now lives on Mars.
Anyway! You kind of still have to be there watching, I guess. But getting backstory on the world built by the original comic is very, very helpful. I'm even considering seeking the original Watchmen out to read it, and I never read comic books.
It's been days and days since we last had rain. I miss it. I don't want all this sunshine in November. At least Daylight Saving Time is over and the days are shorter. Even leaving work at 4:30, it's mostly dark by the time I get home. I thought I'd be able to read the whole way and I could only see the words very well for about half the walk. So then I listened to Madonna on my AirPods.
It sure is fun reading this novel, Hollow Kingdom, though. It's technically a "zombie apocalypse" story, which I would usually want to avoid—I am so fucking sick of zombies—but for two key factors. First, it's all told from the perspective of the surviving animals, as opposed to human survivors (of which there seem to be none, 75 pages in at least), particularly the narrator, a foul-mouthed American crow named Shit Turd (or S.T.). I laughed nearly once per page the first twenty or so pages. Second, it's also set in Seattle, and is packed with local references I can very easily picture vividly. The one oddity is the reference to the "partially demolished" Alaska Way Viaduct when, as of now, the thing is completely removed. No zombies anywhere.
There are many other species of animals that come up intermittently as characters, and as a result I am intermittently learning some pretty amazing things.
I would say the humor is tapering off slightly, giving way to more density of storytelling, which is fine. Using humor as a hook at the start is kind of a smart move, and once the world of the story is established, you want to stay there, even if the punchlines aren't coming at as much of a lightning pace. The laughs are still fairly consistent. I will have to finish the book before I make a final judgment on it, but so far I can pretty safely say it's been ages since I have been this delighted by a novel.
Every month I switch out my monthly rotation of photos that run as a slideshow as my PC desktop images: two regular desktop flatscreen monitors, and the open laptop monitor. Years ago, it was a monthly rotation of slideshows for the screensaver. But, PCC disallowed personalizing that around the time we moved to the new office location in 2016. I improvised by moving the rotation to desktop images.
My two flatscreen monitors are generally full of the many programs I keep open. I don't put any of them over on the laptop monitor, though, so there I can glance over and see the changing photos.
The November slideshow is Thanksgiving themed, the vast majority of them photos of the PCC Thanksgiving Feast. These days, after a few years with several people I would consider pillars of PCC history retiring, it includes a lot of great people who no longer work here. Mimi, Janice, Rita, Goldie, and more. By next year even Nancy T will be part of that list. The changeover in leadership in just the past three years or so has been pretty stark. It's kind of bittersweet to see these photos now, in a way it never used to be.
A year or two ago, during the Thanksgiving Feast, Aimée ran a slideshow of my photos in the conference room where we all ate. And there were so many new people here, there was a lot of looking at photos of, say, Janice, and people saying, "Who's that?" And when such vital people disappear from our collective memory so quickly, it makes me sad.
At least I can also feel privileged to have known them.
[posted 12:24 pm]