Personal Musings category archive

Notre Dame got beat so badly in the Orange Bowl that the band wanted to leave at the end of the third quarter.

Also, commercials are getting dumber (yeah, I didn’t think it was possible either). Compared to Verizon’s welcome-to-the-Matrix Droid ads, Speedy Alka-Seltzer was blankety-blank War and Peace and M&Ms in the swimming pool was the bleedin’ Bolshoi.

It’s most amazing how often “be a man” translates into “do something stupid.”

Kansas City played a large role in the growth of the blues, so I wonder whether their company name is not a coincidence.

Three years later, HollenWolff LLC, a company Stoehr started with two partners, has launched its first product: mechanical cuff links that use ball bearings to secure and release the halves.

It is ironic that the biggest argument against Christianity is the conduct of those who most loudly proclaim their own Christian-ness.

Matthew 6:5.

If the embed doesn’t work, click here.

I wonder how many persons are waiting to see what happens today hoping to get out of Christmas shopping?

I’m so old I can remember when television networks had new Christmas specials every year.

I do enjoy the schmaltzy Christmas pop songs of my youth, but if I never hear “Little Drummer Boy” again, it will be about 10,000 times too late.

It was 70 Fahrenheits on the first day of December, a temperature which, when I was growing up in these parts, would have been inconceivable (50 maybe, on an unseasonably warm day), but it clearly can have nothing to do with global heating.

Move along now, nothing to see here.

If you are unwilling to identify yourself, I’m unwilling to answer the phone.

I looked at the couch and realized that we have

Shreddinger’s Cat!

Romney lost the election not because he failed to convey the Republican message, but because he succeeded.

He conveyed, displayed, even portrayed it most accurately..

I wonder whether all the sirens I heard yesterday morning could have been this?

I was over that way on Witchduck Road (named after a real witch ducking) just about that time.

The number of messages I must delete unheard from my answering machine has decreased by 95% since Election Day.

Now it’s back to the usual “reduce! interest! rates!” stuff.

I voted on the way to my assignment. That location had two check-in lines and seven voting machines. Good turnout and 45-minute line. One of the poll workers said there had been a line since they opened at 6:00 a.

My friend voted and had a similar experience. Then she went to her workplace, which volunteers part of its facility to be used as a polling place, and couldn’t find a parking spot so she could go to work.

After I voted, I went to my assigned polling location–a large suburban high school–to hand out sample ballots for the forces of truth, justice, and the American way.

School was not in session, though the staff had an in-service day. But you could not tell that from the parking lot; it was jammed–people made spaces where there were no spaces.

That location had two check-in lines and ten voting machines.

And a three- to four-hour wait.

Some persons left without voting because they had to pick up their kids or go to work. Some of those, whom I commend wholeheartedly, came back, knowing what kind of wait they faced.

Regulars told me such waits are not uncommon in that location.

After lunchtime, some persons from the neighborhood came out with free coffee and doughnuts for the crowd, then someone showed up from the local Obama headquarters with cases of bottled water to distribute to the waiting voters.

Something is wrong when a polling location is so woefully understaffed with poll workers and voting machines on a regular basis.

I was on my feet for five and a half hours handing out “lit” (erature) and joking with the folks in line, who were generally good-natured.

One fellow did choose to get into a tiff with a lady distributing lit for a school board candidate. It seemed to be an apolitical snit. I guess he was a bad attitude waiting for a victim. Other than that, it was uneventful and, because of the attitude of the voters, a not unpleasant experience.

But long.

I don’t plan to watch the returns. I plan to check in on them from time to time while drinking heavily.

The torrent of Republican lies has exhausted me.

On the bright side, the 2016 campaign starts tomorrow.

Image via Comically Vintage.

Ten robocalls so far today, including one accusing President Obama of being a So-chul-ist (anyone who knows anything about Socialism knows better) and an enemy of Christianity and of a decent moral order.

The Republican Party and its dupes, symps, and fellow travelers have become vile and disgusting things.

Q. What creation of lawyers has annoyed more persons for a longer time more persistently than any other?

I used my bicycle for actual transportation today.

Usually I just ride around in circles.

Today, though, I dropped off the truck at Bucky’s because of a coolant leak (new radiator, 300 bucks). There’s a nice quiet residential neighborhood between there and here, so I bicycled back, admiring the houses outfitted in celebration of All Hallows Eve.

Karl Rove’s PAC keeps calling up my answering machine and telling it lies.

I am an avid Sherlockian. I have three different versions of the Canon, including William S. Baring-Gould’s monumental Annotated, as well as two biographies of Holmes, the Encyclopedia Sherlockiana, and several dozen pastiches, parodies, and what today are called “re-imaginings.”

I was mildly surprised Victoria Coren doesn’t like the idea of Lucy Liu as Watson in the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Elementary. Indeed, she was able to dislike it without having seen it:

Meanwhile, Lucy Liu is worried that people will see only the gender change to her character and miss another excellent improvement to the rubbish old original story, telling the Times: “It was a very big deal for me to play an Asian-American in Charlie’s Angels; Watson’s ethnicity is also a big deal”, as if someone had bet her £100 that she couldn’t cause at least three Conan Doyle fans to suffer a pulmonary embolism.

Personally, I’d like to press Liu’s face into a bowl of cold pea soup for that statement. It’s not just her failure to distinguish between creating a new character and mangling a beloved old one (Tread softly! You tread on my dreams!), but the triumphant tone over such an appalling and offensive racial change. Let me be clear: I rather like the idea of an Asian Watson, but American? God save us all.

Coren shows an uncharacteristic insularity (well, she does live on an island) that ignores the long history of Sherlock Holmes parodies, imitators, spin-offs, and rebirths, from Solar Pons to Naked is the Best Disguise. Indeed, somewhere along the line I read a story that posited Sherlock Holmes in a partnership with Teddy Roosevelt.

One suspects her ideal Watson to be the insufferable dunderhead portrayed by Nigel Bruce in the movies and on radio–the Watson of large walrus moustache and small IQ. (You can find many of the Nigel Bruce-Basil Rathbone radio shows at various OTR sites and the Internet Archive–see the OTR section on the sidebar.)*

Elementary is quite a skillful “re-imagining” of Holmes and Watson, fast-paced and, by the absurdly low standards of American television mysteries, well-plotted. It uses fewer plot gimmicks to get from body to arrest than popular shows such as CSI, NCIS, and Bones, which purport to use science and technology to track down clues but which, actually, use some kind of fictional science in which month-long lab tests are completed during the commercial break and in which agencies have resources that no actual government agency has, except perhaps the NSA (for example, what investigative agency would devote a team of four highly-skilled scientists and two FBI agents to investigate the death of a print-shop clerk, even it the remains were found in a post office? It was quite good fun to watch, but, really, give me a freaking break!).

I suspect that, if Sherlock Holmes were contacted in Sussex, where he has been quietly keeping bees and investigating methods of segregation of the queen since his retirement, he would suggest that Victoria Coren could benefit from cultivating her sense of playfulness, which seems somewhat underdeveloped.

Updated 2012-10-15: Edited for clarity.

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*The best portrayal of Holmes and Watson, the one truest to the spirit and characters of the Canon, was the one in the Jeremy Brett series, in which Watson, much like Lucy Liu’s Watson, was no bumbling idiot, but rather an intelligent person who just cannot keep up with Holmes–a Mustang to Holmes’s Lamborghini.