TV

Happy 200th Anniversary of Publication

The now famous Clement More poem ‘,’ was written in 1822, but first appeared in print a year later in the Troy (NY) Sentinel and has become better known as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’. While the original version is still published annually in quite a few newspapers, , and here on Life of Brian in 2003, it has been adapted and modified by various groups trying to make it into their own holiday poem. In the early 2000’s, someone with a lot of free time collected as many (849) as he could find and published a webpage listing them all. It was last edited in 2013, so who knows how many more there are now.

Back in 2014 I found a Miata one of unknown vintage on the Flyin’ Miata website, purveyors of all kinds of Miata goodies…

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the Counties,
The Miatas were parked, warm and safe from the Mounties;
The driving gloves had been packed, with loving care,
Knowing that next Spring they would still be there;

His ‘n her Miata owners were nestled snug in their beds,
While visions of forced-induction danced in their heads;
And mamma in her FM shirt, and I in my cap,
Were planning next year’s drives on a dog-eared road map,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I dropped my Miata Musings to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

What I saw made me weep and shook me to the core,
It was a Velocity Red Mica Mazdaspeed Miata, a two-thousand and four!
With a tall thin man driving, like a bat out of hell,
I knew in a moment it must be Bill Cardell.

“Now, ELVIS! now, TRACKDOG!
now, FILOU and TORO!
On, ANGEL on BABY!
on, CUZI and PHOENIX!
To the point of that apex!
cut the driving edge fine!
Now make that last mad dash!
all the way to the finish line!”

And I heard on the roof the sound of much fun,
The squealing and chirping of Toyo RA-1’s.
As I grabbed the car keys, and was turning around,
Down the chimney Bill came in with a bound.

He was dressed all in Nomex, from his head to his toe,
With tight fitting driving shoes so he could shift just so;
The sunglasses he wore sparkled with a dancing light,
And I thought to myself “How the hell can he see at night?”

Around the room to the stockings he raced,
Leaving Hard Dog Deuce bars and a FM Cannon Brace,
I even saw under the tree, by a moon so low and so pale,
Nothing less than a Da’Lan hitch and a brand new Tire Tail!

Bill was ready to leave, “Other slalomers yet to go!”,
And make his way through the white winter’s snow.
But he left mine till last, ‘fore he went up the flue,
I found in my stocking a brand new FM-II!

He sprang to his droptop, blipping the throttle with a roar,
And I knew right away the 2.0L was stroked, not bored.
I heard him exclaim, ere he squealed out of sight,
“KEEP the needle at REDLINE and CUT the corners Tight!”

Harrowing Experience

I don’t know how I found the show Harrow on Hulu, maybe it was a recommendation, but it was a mystery of the week type show from Australia about a pathologist. The first episode opens with someone in a boat in the dark of night. They have a body in a tarp which they cover with some kind of powder before tossing into the deep. After the intro montage we get into the show and we get our autopsy case of the week going, but it is a cold case that has nothing to do with the show’s opening.

Early on we get a shot of where he calls home and it is a sailboat parked on the waterfront with a great view of downtown Brisbane. Wait a minute, coroner lives on a boat, where have I seen that before? I had to go back and look because I wasn’t sure, Jack Klugman in a nearly 50 year old TV show called Quincy, a rule bending coroner solving murders weekly who also lives on a sailboat. And while there are similarities, the TV landscape has changed in the intervening years, so that we now have almost always a thread that runs through all the shows in a season and there is always more ancillary, family & co-workers, characters that also get their own story arcs too. Oh, and we get a complicated love interest for the leading man.

Halfway through episode one Harrow is called to the scene of a body found in the water that was incased in cement, aah, the show’s opening. But for some reason our hero seems to be a bit worried about this concrete encased case. At the end of the episode we find out why – the man dumping the body is non other than our leading man, Doctor Daniel Harrow. After dodging what seemed like a thousand near misses in being caught for murdering his ex-wife’s husband and dumping his concrete encrusted body, by season ender he is totally in the clear. As Harrow celebrates with a glass of wine on the deck of his boat he is shot through the gut.

Episode one of season two he gets out of the hospital, a new girlfriend (who later turns out to be his new co-worker) and the gist of the second season’s over arcing story line. The fellow who shot him has a grudge against him because Harrow solved the case that sent him to prison. The kicker is that everyone in Harrow’s world, except him, believes that our villain died in a prison fire.

So, in between solving the case of the week Harrow tries to prove the man is alive all the while being tormented as the bad guy screws with his emotions by harassing and setting up his family members for arrests. In episode two our pathologist is hung off the side of a skyscraper, in the forth he has to swim in a dangerous crocodile infested river to get a body, in the sixth he gets locked in a refrigerated shipping container and in #8 he is buried alive by our “dead” villain. Of course at the very end of the season ender episodes he proves the bad guy is alive and he saves his daughter’s life from his nemesis. At the very end he hands this bad guy a rose that has some sort of poison on the thorns which kills the guy and we fade to black.

I was unsure if I was going to watch the 3rd and final season, but thought I’ll watch the first show and see how it goes. After about 10 minutes in and they are doing an autopsy on the case of the week Harrow wants to know why no one has done any lab work on the deceased. This triggered me to wonder why there was no mention of an autopsy or blood work on last season’s bad guy’s death. Surely if a just caught police prisoner dies after being loaded into a paddy wagon alive there would have been an investigation.

Season 3 of Harrow remains unwatched.

Hulu Hoops

With football season just around the corner it was time to start thinking about how we were going to get the local channels after cutting half the cord back in February.

To get those football games we had the option of going with either YouTube TV or Hulu. In the end we chose Hulu because for about the same price as YouTube they were offering a bundle that included Disney+ and ESPN+ to go along with that Live TV.

ESPN+ I’m not too sure about, but Disney+ is going to be a treasure chest full of promising stuff. All the Star Wars stuff, the old movies and the new original TV content and the whole Marvel Universe of movies and TV as well.

Hulu has a couple of original series that I’ve heard good things about, but have never seen. Like Only Murders in the Building and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Another big draw to Hulu was it was the home of FX which has a couple of shows I’ve seen and would like to watch again Justified and Better Things. FX also has a few newer shows that sound promising, like Mr Inbetween, Reservation Dogs and The Old Man.

Ted Lasso Erases A Week Of My Life

In a couple of day’s ago post I mentioned watching the Red Sox playing on MLBTV. Well, one of the commercials in between innings was an offer for a 2 month free trial of Apple TV+. I had the commercial on mute, so I didn’t hear what they were on about, but I thought, “Hmmm, I’ve wanted to check Apple TV+, but never pulled the trigger for one reason or another. This looks a pretty good deal.”

So, I went to apple.co/mlbgift and signed up (offer is good until July 7th if you are interested.) Turns out the reason is that Apple TV+ has the rights to one Friday night baseball game, chosen by MLB maybe, for the season and they also have a 30 minute nightly MLB recap. I have not bothered with the recap show, but I did watch an inning or two of last Friday’s Dodgers Cardinals game. I may keep and eye out for Red Sox game on Fridays between now and June 24th when my free trial ends.

So, anyway, the first show I wanted to check out was this Ted Lasso show all the cool people were talking about. Tuesday night the 18th I watched Season 1 Episode 1. I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, it seemed like just another fish out of water story and Jason Sudeikis’s character seemed too broadly drawn and the accent was kind of over the top. I wasn’t going to watch anymore, but as I was talking to Donna about it, I suggested watching Episode 2 on Wednesday at lunch and if she seemed interested we would watch the show together.

She was not interested, so I figured that was that. Later that afternoon, with nothing else going on I thought, let me watch episode three and if I don’t get into it, I’ll move on. After that third show I watched the fourth. I got interested in the arcs of the cast of characters that surround out titular hero and I am a lover of listening to the accents when the Queen’s English is spoken. And I’d become used to the Ted Lasso character.

On Thursday I watched the next four episodes, this left only two episodes of the first season for Friday which lead to rolling right into season two. The only time I came up for air over the the weekend was Sunday night to watch Thursday’s new episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel my previous favorite show.

Sometime on Tuesday I ran out of episodes when I finished episode 6 of season three. So now I had to wait until the next day for Apple TV+ to release the next show and after that I’d stuck waiting a whole week between new episodes. I briefly considered waiting for 6 weeks so I could binge those last set of season three’s shows, but couldn’t do it, I watched episode seven the next day when it became available.

It Works

Two weeks ago I found out that the FRS were the free game of the day on MLBTV, so I thought I’d tune in. They were in last place in the division at 5 wins and 6 loses, but hey it’s still early in the season. I just looked today and currently the Red Sox are 13 & 13 and still in last place in the division, two games behind the Yankees and eight behind the division leading Tampa Bay Rays. Oh. well, wait’ll next year.

Plus I also wanted to see a game and check on how the whole pitch clock thing was working out. I’m not sure how the players like the clock, but according to a Bleacher Report article, MLB says it has knocked an average of 26 minutes from game times. Wow. The game I watched with the Angels still went almost 3 hours, but hey, it could have been nearly 3-1/2 hours.

I scanned back several games and found that several of their games have been just a few minutes over two and a half hours. This means that if I was still back on the east coast those 7:10 PM starts would be ending at a sensible half past ten. This pitch clock thing might have even prevented those games against their arch rivals the Yankees running to nearly midnight. And if I remember, I’ll see how long the games against New York when they play them on back to back weekends in early June.

Thursday Is The New Friday

According to Amazon, Season 5 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was supposed to start on Friday, April 14th, but I just finished watching Episode 1. I’ve run into this before on Amazon Prime, with Season 4 of this show, as well as Season 1 of Reacher last year too. My theory is that it is a time zone thing, it is already tomorrow in Europe (and it is also almost tomorrow on the East Coast right now too), but who knows.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago IMDB had nine episodes listed for this season, but no real dates on the episodes except for April 14, 2023 for the first. I wondered how they would show each episode, and if IMDB is correct, we get all of the first three episodes this week and the following six will come out one at a time every “Friday” until the show finale on May 26th.

I’ve watched episode one and I wonder if I can stretch out the other two episodes during this week gap, say every other day, so as to bridge the gap until episode four next “Friday.” Oh, who am I kidding, I’ll probably watch them tomorrow morning…

Watching Family Trees Grow

Donna and I have been a big fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s show on PBS called Finding Your Roots for quite a while. While it is fun to dig into the family trees of actors, musicians and other famous people, it always come with an interesting history lesson that a member of their family was directly involved in.

Because we have a subscription to Peacock so we can watch bicycle racing we were pleasantly surprised to stumble on a show on it called Who Do You Think You Are?. It is pretty much the same thing as Finding Your Roots except is from NBC and sponsored by Ancestry.com.

The PBS version is a nicer shop to watch because there are no interruptions for commercials and it will usually follow both sides of the person’s lineage back. The NBC version usually just picks one branch to chase back and while we don’t get commercials (we subscribe to the add-free level), we still get the 4 or 5 interruptions, with the title cards where commercials were, along with some sort of “cliff hanger” before and the repeat of when we get back.

After watching the 6 episodes of Season 1 of the show on Peacock and because the copyright date at the end of the last show was MMXX (aka: 2020), Donna asked, “I wonder if they are going to make more?” So I headed off to IMDB to see if there were any more. Turns out there are 85 total episodes over 12 seasons of the show. Not only that, but the “season 1” we watched on Peacock was actually season 12, the last one listed on IMDB.

A bit of poking around led to the discovery (pun intended) that the show aired for several years on TLC. Wait a minute, I’ve seen TLC listed on the Discovery+ streaming service we also subscribe to. Sure enough, we could watch more of the show, Discovery+ had seasons 4 thru 10. We had already seen 12 on Peacock, so where were seasons 1,2,3 and 11?

Adding up the total episodes from each season listed on Discovery+ for seasons 4 thru 10 comes up at 49. I then counted the episodes on IMDB for seasons 4 thru 11 and the total episodes was 49 again. The seasons on IMDB and Discovery+ didn’t line up, the quantity of episodes per each season were different and some shows were listed in different seasons.

So I tried a third source, Wikipedia. I counted episodes from season 4 to 10, because this source called season 11 what IMDB called 12 and Peacock called season 1, confused, me too. Anyway Wikipedia’s total was 52! I went through the list and found the 3 missing episodes, J.K. Rowling, Minnie Driver and Jim Parsons.

Also on Wikipedia I learned that seasons 1, 2 & 3 of the show were originally broadcast on NBC. Hello? Peacock is the streaming arm of NBC, why aren’t they available there?

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 10