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Tim's and Tom's and Times-a-Wastin'
Nov. 6th, 2021 02:25 pmOnly three days remain of my 62nd year on the planet. My sister has remembered my I Ain't Taking Social Security Yet birthday with a Dunkin Donuts gift card and a puppet of family history.
I tend to be a Timmy's guy, but that's getting to be a stretch. At one of their shops closest to home, I've encountered a guy at the drive-thru several times. His name is Jordan, but I refer to him as Too Much Coffee Man. That's partly inspired by a comic strip character, but mostly because he sounds exactly like the overcaffeinated guy in this old George Carlin bit:
I've now run into TMCM three times. The first time a few months ago, he gave me two orders including mine. The second time, last month, he didn't give me an order at all and I had to double back for it. This time, Wednesday morning, he got the order right but forgot to ask me to pay and I had to forcibly hand money to him. I figure he's completing his training before they send him over to Dunkie's as a spy; give him a week or so on their drive-thru and they'll be out of business in no time;)
----
Then the package arrived today, containing a finger puppet she recently found on a museum visit.
That would be our Great-Great Uncle-in-Law Tom. I worked out the genealogy of things back in early pandemic days when our library made some databases available. Thomas Edison married my paternal grandfather's father's brother's sister Mary, and she produced the first two of his children, nicknamed "Dot" and "Dash," before her premature death. They all figure in the plot of A Current War, which Donna went out to see in cinema last year just as COVID was dropping the curtain on all such things, and which we eventually caught up with in home viewing. His battles with competitors have become the thing of trope, showing up, not only in that film and the earlier Prestige, but in the series premiere of Republic of Doyle cousin Murdoch Mysteries and in a last-season episode of Doctor Who.
Anyway, this Edis-ition is also magnetic, so he's taken up permanent residence on the frigidy-daire:
At least we don't have him westing on a Westinghouse. The electrified fights would've kept us up all night;)
----
Speaking of the Doctor, Thirteen's final season began this past weekend. It's a serialized limited set of episodes through Christmas called Flux, to be followed by her (and the current showrunner's) departure in the first part of 2022. The premiere dropped on Halloween and was fittingly spooky, but I thought they tried cramming in too much new stuff and very old throwbacks to prior series' villains, while not doing enough to develop the new Doctor-Yaz companionship or set up who the other new primary characters are. I bought a season pass to the thing, so I'll stick with it. Not that they're making it easy: I bought it through iTunes, as I've done previous years, and Apple finally made nice-nice with Samsung so there's an Apple TV app on our telly, but when I went to install it, it told me sorry, not enough memory, try deleting shit. So I did- various ridealong apps from ones we'd installed, but then ESPN, PBS Kids, several others? Nope, you cannot delete those. Turns out they're known as "bloatware," and these networks pay the television manufacturers to preload them and make them permanent. So my go-to guru has confirmed the only out would be a factory reset, to clear some space but at the cost of all our other prior downloads and password authorizations.
I think I'll stick to just plugging the laptop in until this series is over.
----
Others we've either finished or given up on:
Last I checked, Endeavour has not even been set for a PBS airdate for its current three-episode series, but all were available on YouTube complete with some Siri-like autosubtitles. We finished the third the other night, and while Evans and Allam are as good as ever, the plotlines are all over the place, their showrunner also did too much cramming of throwbacks and not enough continuity to more recent events, and this one at times almost seemed like a Knives Out spoof of a Christie story. (We learned, from a new go-to blog for the series, that a bus central to the "Terminus" plot actually stops outside a church containing Dame Agatha's final resting place. Spoiler alert: many spoilers in this review, and he really REALLY didn't like it. It's the 33rd Endeavour episode, matching the 33 of the original Morse and 33 of the sequel Lewis, and the author suspects ITV and the showrunner are saving things for a grand finale 100th appearance superepisode. Mind how you go with that.)
We've bailed on a couple of films we had high hopes for. Last night's was The Harder They Fall, a blaxploitation take on the spaghetti westerns of old. Too many characters, not enough redeeming qualities, and way too much violence.
And then there's Dune.
Well, we tried. Got about half an hour into part one of its new film incarnation. No. Just no.
I know Herbert had it first, but it's Episode IV. Or maybe VII. Only without the snark and the character interactions that made Star Wars work. Every one of them was carrying so much gravitas, I'm surprised they didn't all sink into the sand and die ten minutes into the film.
Not even Hans Zimmer could keep us in.
I DO want to go back to the David Lynch version now, which I've never seen. Just the idea of Sir Patrick On Stilts is enough to blow an hour or two. This isn't.
On the other hand, a good parody or two wouldn't hurt:
Now THAT would have really tied the saga together;)
I tend to be a Timmy's guy, but that's getting to be a stretch. At one of their shops closest to home, I've encountered a guy at the drive-thru several times. His name is Jordan, but I refer to him as Too Much Coffee Man. That's partly inspired by a comic strip character, but mostly because he sounds exactly like the overcaffeinated guy in this old George Carlin bit:
I've now run into TMCM three times. The first time a few months ago, he gave me two orders including mine. The second time, last month, he didn't give me an order at all and I had to double back for it. This time, Wednesday morning, he got the order right but forgot to ask me to pay and I had to forcibly hand money to him. I figure he's completing his training before they send him over to Dunkie's as a spy; give him a week or so on their drive-thru and they'll be out of business in no time;)
----
Then the package arrived today, containing a finger puppet she recently found on a museum visit.
That would be our Great-Great Uncle-in-Law Tom. I worked out the genealogy of things back in early pandemic days when our library made some databases available. Thomas Edison married my paternal grandfather's father's brother's sister Mary, and she produced the first two of his children, nicknamed "Dot" and "Dash," before her premature death. They all figure in the plot of A Current War, which Donna went out to see in cinema last year just as COVID was dropping the curtain on all such things, and which we eventually caught up with in home viewing. His battles with competitors have become the thing of trope, showing up, not only in that film and the earlier Prestige, but in the series premiere of Republic of Doyle cousin Murdoch Mysteries and in a last-season episode of Doctor Who.
Anyway, this Edis-ition is also magnetic, so he's taken up permanent residence on the frigidy-daire:
At least we don't have him westing on a Westinghouse. The electrified fights would've kept us up all night;)
----
Speaking of the Doctor, Thirteen's final season began this past weekend. It's a serialized limited set of episodes through Christmas called Flux, to be followed by her (and the current showrunner's) departure in the first part of 2022. The premiere dropped on Halloween and was fittingly spooky, but I thought they tried cramming in too much new stuff and very old throwbacks to prior series' villains, while not doing enough to develop the new Doctor-Yaz companionship or set up who the other new primary characters are. I bought a season pass to the thing, so I'll stick with it. Not that they're making it easy: I bought it through iTunes, as I've done previous years, and Apple finally made nice-nice with Samsung so there's an Apple TV app on our telly, but when I went to install it, it told me sorry, not enough memory, try deleting shit. So I did- various ridealong apps from ones we'd installed, but then ESPN, PBS Kids, several others? Nope, you cannot delete those. Turns out they're known as "bloatware," and these networks pay the television manufacturers to preload them and make them permanent. So my go-to guru has confirmed the only out would be a factory reset, to clear some space but at the cost of all our other prior downloads and password authorizations.
I think I'll stick to just plugging the laptop in until this series is over.
----
Others we've either finished or given up on:
Last I checked, Endeavour has not even been set for a PBS airdate for its current three-episode series, but all were available on YouTube complete with some Siri-like autosubtitles. We finished the third the other night, and while Evans and Allam are as good as ever, the plotlines are all over the place, their showrunner also did too much cramming of throwbacks and not enough continuity to more recent events, and this one at times almost seemed like a Knives Out spoof of a Christie story. (We learned, from a new go-to blog for the series, that a bus central to the "Terminus" plot actually stops outside a church containing Dame Agatha's final resting place. Spoiler alert: many spoilers in this review, and he really REALLY didn't like it. It's the 33rd Endeavour episode, matching the 33 of the original Morse and 33 of the sequel Lewis, and the author suspects ITV and the showrunner are saving things for a grand finale 100th appearance superepisode. Mind how you go with that.)
We've bailed on a couple of films we had high hopes for. Last night's was The Harder They Fall, a blaxploitation take on the spaghetti westerns of old. Too many characters, not enough redeeming qualities, and way too much violence.
And then there's Dune.
Well, we tried. Got about half an hour into part one of its new film incarnation. No. Just no.
I know Herbert had it first, but it's Episode IV. Or maybe VII. Only without the snark and the character interactions that made Star Wars work. Every one of them was carrying so much gravitas, I'm surprised they didn't all sink into the sand and die ten minutes into the film.
Not even Hans Zimmer could keep us in.
I DO want to go back to the David Lynch version now, which I've never seen. Just the idea of Sir Patrick On Stilts is enough to blow an hour or two. This isn't.
On the other hand, a good parody or two wouldn't hurt:
Now THAT would have really tied the saga together;)