The 35th Precinct

( The Rings of Power 1x02--Adrift )

I'm going to tough it out because I want to get to the orc battles of season two, but this series will likely be forgotten immediately.

I'm still doing my CSI rewatch, and while I'm still reveling in the cozy, comfort-show nostalgia, there are some episodes and characters about which my opinion has shifted. For instance, when I watched the series during its original run, I thought Grissom could do no wrong and was lukewarm on Catherine, who seemed to have a chronic case of Mama Bear Syndrome. Nick and Warrick were the quintessential Good Dudes, and I LOVED them; Sara was the grating, whiny, militant vegan and feminist who lost all objectivity on domestic violence and rape cases; Greg was the quirky, hip, young genius with a grasp of current pop culture trends among the rich, young, and beautiful.

On the rewatch, however, I'm surprised by how much Grissom irks me. I still like him and find him a decent man with a sense of ethics and good intentions, but I also find him obnoxiously condescending to those around him. Not at the level of Hodges, thank God, but it's clear he's used to being the smartest guy in the room, if not the city, and that he believes his moral code is not only the best, but infallible, and the only one there should be. Oh, his mouth says all the right things--that he's human and flawed and has no intention of judging others for their choices--but his attitude belies the words. He believes he's transcended the needs and foibles of ordinary plebes with his scientific mind and self-imposed asceticism, and he absolutely judges his subordinates for their failings.

The condescension wafts from him like eau de asswipe in Episode 4x06, "Jackpot", when a severed head in a bucket draws him to an isolated backwater in search of the rest of the body and the truth. From the moment he steps into the diner, he exudes impatience and ill-concealed irritation with their lack of urgency, and for a guy who preaches about fascination with any group that falls without established societal norms, it doesn't take him long to get pissy with the town's lack of experience in conducting murder investigations or access to state-of-the-art equipment. I'm sorry, Your Holiness, but when the coroner is the veterinarian, you're not going to get Vegas-caliber results in an hour. Sniffing at his offers of help and hospitality does you no credit. For all you know, his house might've been perfectly lovely, if austere. But sure, show your moral superiority by spurning his offer while commandeering his small practice for your research.

Ass.

And for all his prating, he was quick to impute nefarious motives to the sheriff. whom he treated like an errand boy who should be grateful to bask in his wisdom and citified slickness. Because, you know, none of the yokels in these parts has been educated, and none of them could possibly have hobbies or interests as eclectic as his. The entire episode is just a steaming heap of metropolitan self-fellatio and an embarrassment to the character. I want to say I'm surprised it made past the writers' room, but I'm not. Hollywood writers have always seen themselves as smarter and more sophisticated than the unwashed rabble they dazzle with their brilliance, and they've never missed an opportunity to have the characters strut and preen onscreen the way their creators seldom do in their more pedestrian lives of spouses and children and mortgages and endless commutes on the 405.

As for the other characters, my feelings for the men have remained largely static, whereas I find myself more in sympathy with Sara and Catherine. Those women have seen some shit and put up with a hell of a lot more, and the more I watch, the more I wonder that they haven't lost their shit and bludgeoned Grissom to death with his office chair.

All right, self, back on the stick with ye. You might not have much to say, but you won't know until you unlimber your fingers.

Though I have been silent, I have not been idle. I finished the story I was working on, though not in time for Christmas as I'd hoped, and the recipient was well pleased. They are, it seems, the only one, since it has received no other comments, but at least they did. Eventually, I'll come up with another idea and start clacking away, but there's no rush. Any fans I may have had have clearly wandered to more prolific--and possibly more cheerful--pastures.

I've returned to noodling about on Duolingo. My Spanish and German are still in good shape, but my Russian is embarrassing. Granted, I only had a single semester in college instead of eight and three years, respectively, for the others, but still. The pronunciation isn't bad; in fact, my mouth and tendency toward nasal liquidity are suited to it, but I can't connect the sounds with the written words to save my life yet. Written Cyrillic is lovely, but my Latinate-coded brain is having a hard time making the transition. There's nothing for it but to keep trying.

On the less lofty front, I'm doing an X-Files rewatch. I still love it, but wow, is it so painfully 90s, and David Duchovny's acting is much more uneven in the early going than I remember. Young!me sided with Mulder and his tinhatty idealism, but as I live in the age of Trump and the final collapse of America's aspirations to righteous nobility, I find myself sympathizing with Scully. Mulder might be right, but he's also an ineffectual weenie, and what's the point of poking the bear when all you're going to do is cry about the unfairness of being eaten? Either make an earnest attempt at changing the status quo or shut the fuck up and let Scully have her goddamn bubble bath, Mulder.

I'm still plowing manfully through NYPD Blue S1. Fortunately for my beleaguered eyeballs, there has yet to be a reappearance of Caruso's Flobberwormesque complexion or his pasty bum, though they continue to bludgeon me with his smothering, pathological "romance" with Janice. So much of the show is so excellent--the characterizations, the diversity of the cast, the decision to pull victims from all walks of life, the acknowledgement that not all victims are perfect, and that many of them are denied justice by a justice system skewed to protect the rights of the accused, the often uncomfortable yet unflinching portrayals of racism, sexism, and ableism--but it's given short shrift so that Caruso/Kelly can be the Big Damn Hero and the moral hub through which all other plotlines must pass. I'm going to shake my asymmetrical ass in with the unbridled glee of Gollum being reunited with his Precious when they give his character the boot early in S2. Caruso drifting from the show on the overinflated balloon of his gargantuan ego was the best thing that ever happened to this show.

I finished Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death by Richard Marinus. It started off well, but like most academics, he bludgeoned his central theme into paste and leached it of what vitality it once possessed, and by the end, I despised Luther and wanted Marinus to just stop typing.

Luckily for me, it's done and returned to the library, and I never have to cast a jaundiced eye upon it again. Now I can happily devote my attention to a pair of murder mysteries and a horror novel about ancient, mutant spiders that have awakened from their long slumber and crawled from the dark bowels of the earth to wreak chaos and destruction.

I felt miserable and punky all day yesterday, lethargic and headachy and mentally befogged, so of course my brain weasels decided to chime in with the happy possibility that I've got some insidious infection simmering in my teeth that is slowly working its way to my brain, and that is my my head hurts at night. Never mind that the pain vanishes the minute I crawl into bed and let my body relax. Nope. Dying. I've always had anxiety, but it's gotten so much worse the older I get. Just another fine legacy from the walking pox that is my mother, I guess. Thanks, fateful mix of flawed nature and toxic nurture.

Today has been much better. The forecast called for rain, but it's been gorgeous all day. This interminable heatwave has finally loosened its grip, and the temperature kissed eight but briefly and is now falling, which means I won't be wilting in my own pungent soup tonight if/when I watch more NYPD Blue on Prime. I watched the first four seasons when they were being released on DVD in the dim, antediluvian past, and then they stopped releasing them, so I stopped caring, and by the time they got around to it, I'd forgotten most of the plot threads. Now Amazon has the entire series, and I can catch up and see what I missed.

One thing I've never forgotten, though, is how much better the show got once David Caruso left. Most of his scenes have this thin(and sometimes not so thin)layer of smarm, and I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe so many hot, capable women in New York are clamoring to ride his bologna pony. Jimmy Smits was such an upgrade, and even before he showed up, Nicholas Turturro was right there! Oh, well, I'll just have to slog my way through to the better seasons.

Hot damn! Amazon Prime has acquired the rights to the first five seasons of Murder, She Wrote. Little!me loved it to bits because Jessica Fletcher reminded me of nights at my grandmother's house, when she'd get me all kinds of comfortable in her house that screamed Florida retiree and we'd watch it and 60 Minutes and Empty Nest and Golden Girls(and there's another show I adore, and I will have no shame about it). Grandma was safe and stable, and the world made so much more sense then, before I grew up and grew bruised and knew enough to worry about strangling in the dentist chair. So, I watched an episode, and it was as comfortable as I remember it, though as an adult, I find myself wondering why so many experienced homicide investigators are only too happy to defer to an old busybody whose sole experience with murder comes from making them up. But whatever. Who am I to shun memories of better times?

Hot damn the second is that the library's annual sale is coming up in a few weeks. Because of the dentist and Dragoncon, I can't afford to go buck wild like I did last year, but you can bet your boots I'll be putting in an appearance. I can't pass up the chance to pick up another clutch of history books. Last year, I found a complete set of the Thomas Jefferson biography by Dumas Malone. Who knows what will be waiting among the boxes this year?

The forecast is calling for severe weather tomorrow afternoon, so Roomie and I will likely take refuge at the movies. It's going to be Uglydolls, which looks cute, or a second viewing of Avengers: Endgame. If we do the latter, at least we won't be out an ending if the power goes out.

Day 29 of the government shutdown.

I finished Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs. It's a book I've seen referenced in countless Civil War books. I never intended to read it because for every riveting autobiography that gives you a deeper appreciation of its subject, there are twenty snoozefests that paint them as irredeemable wankbags and tempt you to take up the more pleasurable pastime of filing your teeth with a belt sander, but I saw it in the stacks at the library one day and grabbed it on a whim.

What a delight. After millions of pages of ponderous bafflegab on the Civil War, it was so refreshing to read a clear and concise account of what happened from someone who was there. No puffery, no self-aggrandizement, just a matter-of-fact explanation of the campaigns as he saw them. The language was simple yet possessed of a spare elegance that spoke of a keen intelligence, which is not, I am ashamed to say, what I expected. My image of Grant was as a tough, shrewd country bumpkin who tramped about in rumpled clothes and chainsmoked cigars and had no use for schooling if it didn't relate to the military. More fool me.

Much of the appeal comes from Grant. His narrative voice hints at a plain-spoken, humane man with a deep sense of fairness and honor, and the more I read, the more I imagined sitting on the front porch in Galena, Ohio, listening to the runners of his rocker squeak and mutter against the wood and the rumble of his voice as he recounted his experiences between puffs on a cigar. I was sad to leave him with the turning of the last page, and I will forever regret that he did not live to recount the years of his presidency in similar fashion.

I watched five minutes of an episode of Hawaii 5-0 last night because Eddie Cahill was in it. Eddie is still a snack, but man, Alex O'Loughlin is looking rough. He looks like the last potato in a ten-pound sack, the one that may or may not be a garden gnome's sex toy gone incognito.

I'm watching The Killing on Netflix. It's as good as I remember, though I also remember the seething outrage from the fandom when the producers got cute in the name of milking the ratings and failed to name Rosie Larsen's murderer at season's end like their ad campaign promised. Veena Sud can peddle all the bullshit she wants about being true to the story the writers wanted/needed to tell; it was blatantly obvious that they pulled a bait-and-switch once the ratings were higher than expected and decided to stretch the case for another season. It's equally evident that their greedy strategy bit them in the ass when the ratings tanked in S2 because viewers were pissed at being jerked around. I never watched S2 because it conflicted with something I liked more(CSI:NY, maybe). I'm trying to watch it now before it leaves Netflix on March 13th.

Long time, no write, but I've been binging on Netflix. I've been plowing my way through Criminal Minds. I own the first five seasons on DVD and have watched them all, but I haven't pulled them out in years, and there's something seductive about being able to click Next Episode or close the tab. I'd forgotten how good the early seasons were, when the team was still a cohesive, familial unit and it had not yet devolved into squalid torture porn in the vein of Hostel, though it was not without its scummy, badfic elements, i.e., not-very-closet DrugAddict!Reid and Elle "Surprise!DaddyIssues" Greenaway, neither of which was ever resolved, as I recall, satisfactorily or otherwise.

Why do the wheels of a show always part from the creative chassis after five seasons? God knows they did here. Maybe I can get through seasons six through twelve if I don't have to pay for them.