Back in the saddle again

This has been a somewhat long hiatus from blogging due to being down with flu. That may have suggested to readers that I was suffering from serious symptoms. But in actual fact, after the first two days, I was almost back to normal. ‘Almost’ in the operative word here. My temperature was back to almost normal but I could not get rid of a low-grade fever and had a residual dry cough. The latter is for me a common consequence to a flu, not to be shaken for a couple of weeks.

But what really kept me from blogging was sense of blahness that left me with no enthusiasm for doing anything, such as everyday chores or even an appetite. In that condition, the enthusiasm to write, which comes usually comes easily to me, deserted me until today. The fact that it took me this long to get back to normal may mean that this was a different flu variant or that as I get older it will take me longer to bounce back.

It is not that these days were totally wasted. I did find that I could enjoy reading and so took the opportunity to read books that I should have read a long time ago and watched some films and TV shows.
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Michael Moore responds to the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting

In response to the outpouring of anger at the for-profit health insurance companies for their predatory practices that was unleashed by the killing by Luigi Mangione of the UnitedHealth care CEO, there has been a lot of pearl-clutching by the ruling classes and their pundits and political lackeys in both parties, pleading with people not to think of the shooter as a hero and saying that ‘political violence has no place in America’. The last sentiment is utterly disingenuous. Political violence is as American as apple pie and has been used routinely by the ruling classes and their repressive state apparatuses when their power is challenged by ordinary people. What they are scared of is when their authority is challenged by protestors and when political violence targets them.

Apparently Mangione had issued a hand-written manifesto. Many of the mainstream media have refused to publish it in full even though it is very short and have instead quoted bits of it. They have not given any reasons why they did this even though there are many fake ones circulating. Ken Klippenstein says that he has obtained the genuine one and has published it and it is reproduced here in full.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

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Film review: The Name of the Rose (1986)

I saw this film a long time ago, soon after it came out. I did not remember much of the details except that it was dark and moody and set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages and involved the murder of several monks that a visiting monk William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery) and his assistant Adso of Melk (a very young Christian Slater) try to solve.

I read the book of the same name by Umberto Eco last month, and disliked it for its tedious and lengthy discussions of esoterica involving theology and heresy and religious and political intrigue of that period. The main redeeming feature of the second edition of the book was that it had a postscript by the author explaining how and why he wrote it the way he did, including his choice of the title. While it did not improve the book’s standing in my opinion, it did shed light on the writing process and what an author seeks to achieve.
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TV Review: A Man on the Inside (2024)

I recently watched this enjoyable comedy series consisting of eight half-hour episodes that is being streamed on Netflix. I expected it to be good because it comes with a pedigree and it did not disappoint. The series creator is Michael Schur who has had such hits as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place with the last also starring Ted Danson who acts in this series.

Danson plays a retired professor of engineering who, after his wife dies after a prolonged period of dementia, falls into a lethargy that worries his daughter, his only child. She recommends that he take up some hobby and he stumbles across a classified ad in the newspaper that is looking for someone aged 75-85 who knows how to use a phone. He decides to apply and the job turns out to be with a private detective agency that has been hired by the son of a resident in an upscale retirement home in San Francisco to investigate the loss of his mother’s expensive ruby necklace. The detective agency feels that having someone pose as a resident would be a good way to solve the crime by gaining access to the all the people who live and work there. He does not tell his daughter exactly what he is up though, fearing that she might not approve or be worried.
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TV review: Maigret (2016)

The prolific author Georges Simenon, in the years between 1931 and 1972, published 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Jules Maigret, a police officer working in Paris in the mid-twentieth century.

In some ways the stories resemble Columbo in that the focus is not on providing a surprise ending. In many stories, like Columbo, Maigret strongly suspects who the criminal is early on and sets about finding ways to get evidence against him. Like Columbo, he prefers not to use his first name and is referred to as just Maigret, even by his wife. Like Columbo, he is said to be happily married with no children. But unlike with Columbo, his wife does appear in the stories in a supportive and empathetic role. Also unlike Columbo who works alone and seems to be given a free hand by his superiors, Maigret has a team of assistants to aid him but is often interfered with by his superiors for political reasons.

Maigret is a middle-aged man who smokes a pipe and is soft-spoken, contemplative, and measured in his utterances. He is extremely low key and in solving cases, he uses psychology to to get in the mind of the victim and the criminal, trying to figure out the reasons behind their actions. He is kind, empathetic, and a good listener and is known to be highly ethical and thus respected even by the criminal classes.
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Teri Garr (1944-2024)

The endearing actor had an offbeat zany charm that made her perfect for comedy. I always enjoyed seeing her in films and so was saddened by the news of her death at the age of 79.

She became famous after she appeared in Young Frankenstein.

Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation.” That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” — if she could speak with a German accent.

“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

She was a popular guest on TV talk shows.

The actor Lisa Kudrow, who became famous for her role as Phoebe in the hit TV series Friends and then went on to act in many films, strongly reminded me of Garr, both in terms of looks and zaniness and charm. So it seemed like no-brainer casting to have Garr playing Phoebe’s mother in a few episodes of the show. I had not watched Friends and so was unaware of this until I read about it in her obituaries.

Here is a clip from one of those episodes that I found and you can see the resemblance in looks, personality, and acting styles.

Sally Field talks about her own illegal abortion when she was 17

The two-time Academy Award winning actor talks about how she became pregnant around 1964 when she was just 17. She was desperate and didn’t know what to do but a family friend who was a doctor drove her across the border to Tijuana to get an abortion which was illegal then. It was a traumatic experience and, as she says, we are now seeing a resurgence of the same conditions that are forcing women to undergo similar harrowing experiences.

It is a powerful testimony and I hope many people see it and realize how dangerous is the threat to women’s reproductive rights posed by creepy Donald Trump, weird JD Vance, the misogynistic GOP, and a US Supreme Court that wants to take us back to those dark ages.

Film review: Rebel Ridge (2024)

I have written multiple posts about the menace in the US of what is known as ‘civil asset forfeiture’. This is where police can seize the assets of people (cash, cars, even houses) even before they are convicted of any crime and make it well nigh impossible for them to get it back even if they are completely innocent. This has become just another way for some local jurisdictions to raise money to fund their operations, particularly their police departments.

John Oliver highlighted this abuse ten years ago.

A couple of days ago, I watched a new film Rebel Ridge on Netflix that deals with precisely this issue. A young black man Terry Richmond rides his bicycle into a small rural Alabama town with $36,000 in cash, with $10,000 meant to bail out his cousin who was arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, and the remainder for both to buy a truck and start a small hauling business.

But he is stopped by local police who find the money and confiscate it on the grounds that it might be drug-related even though they had no evidence at all. When he tries to get it back he is threatened by the sheriff. Summer McBride, a paralegal in the county courthouse, tells him that she has unearthed evidence that the police department and the judge have a scheme going where people get arrested for minor infractions, the charges get elevated, their property confiscated, and they are thrown in jail with high cash bail. She says that fighting to get their money and property back will take a long time and often cost more than what was confiscated so most people, who are poor and cannot afford a lawyer, will simply give up and walk away.
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Bob Newhart (1929-2024)

The comedian died yesterday at the age of 94.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.
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Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely.

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How to end (and not end) a limited TV series

Back in the day when there was only broadcast television in the US, writers tended to be confined to just one episode to tell a story, similar to a feature film. Limited series, where the writers could spread the story over many hours were relatively rare, because they disrupted the weekly TV schedule, not to mention being more expensive to produce. Yet, the examples of blockbuster hits like Roots, Shogun, and The Thorn Birds showed that there was a market for them, because the extended time enabled the telling of complex stories and better character development.

The arrival of streaming services has seen the flourishing of the limited series since there are no scheduling issues. One downside is that freed from some time constraints, some of the writing is a little bloated but on the whole, the limited series fills an important niche between feature films that tell one story and a normal weekly TV show in which each episode had to be largely self-contained within a short time and thus cannot accommodate complex and lengthy storylines.

There is one problem with the current limited-series model and that is how to end it. If the story is planned as a one-off from the very beginning, then there is no problem. You just end the story at the end and that is it. But some producers want to have the option, if the series is a hit, to bring it back a sequel with many of the same characters. But you do not know in advance when making the first series if it will be a hit so you want to end the series in such a way that viewers will look forward to a sequel series if there is one.
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