A first for us

We didn't watch much network TV back in the day. We'd get videos and DVD's (remember them?) from the library or rental store (remember them too?) to watch movies and some TV shows. Generally we were years behind. We'd sometimes rent season one of something, like it, then realize there were some number of seasons, and it had been cancelled. We've bought into that several times just because the show was that good. For example, Firefly and The Sarah Conner Chronicles, RIP, gone too soon due to network stupidity.

That's in contrast to Grey's Anatomy. We watched that during the early days of COVID. We outright laughed at some of the story lines as it bumped downhill, but eventually they went too far and we bailed out. At least they didn't do a time travel episode, or at least not while we watched. I think it's still going on.

Another favourite, Elementary, we bought in while it was still ongoing, and we'd await the next season coming out on disc. That was one that reached a natural end, as I think of it. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Elementary did that. I would love to see a spin off about how a particular organization goes forward in the wake of events on the show. Pity that one character was killed, I loved watching him. (You might remember John Noble from Lord of the Rings or Fringe, which I liked at first and then gradually lost interest.)

As an aside, about the same time as Elementary we were also watching Sherlock, a British take on Sherlock Holmes. Cumberbatch is a brilliant actor, and the first season was really good, and then it went all pear shaped somehow. I'd rewatch any random episode of Elementary before Sherlock.

We recently got Acorn to chew through Brokenwood Mysteries, since we weren't sure we had watched them in order, which matters a little bit but not a requirement, since I'm quite fond of the character chemistry. There's another season of that coming out. We tried The Amazing Johnsons since the premise was interesting, and it features one of the actors from Brokenwood, but we were disappointed and stopped at the end of the first season.

We did Midsomer Murders, all bazillion seasons of it. The more recent seasons aren't as good as the earlier ones, and there's more coming. Somehow we got onto My Life is Murder, but that was really disappointing. Our nickname for the show was Inadmissible Evidence. That led us to A Remarkable Place to Die, which we quite liked, especially since we'd been to Queenstown and knew some of the area.

You might remember this photo. That's the Remarkables off to the left, which I admit doesn't really do them justice. 

And last night was the first. Most recently we discovered The Chelsea Detective quite by accident. The quality of the acting is really good, the camera work is excellent, and the procedural aspects of it are more believable than most. Yes, of course there's some story mechanics formula, and some might say it's a bit slow paced, and the actual deaths are pretty pedestrian compared to Midsomer, but I like how the story unfolds, and the length of the episodes gives the time to drag some red herrings across the set. 

We had just finished season 3, episode 3, and were looking for the episode 4 we knew existed. It does, but doesn't air till Monday. So here we are, right up to the minute on a show. Amazing. I think they've started filming a season 4, and we're looking forward to that.

Back in the day, when I was working out of town I liked to catch Mythbusters on TV. I saw some number of episodes, and of course have seen any number of snippets on Youtube. But in between things, if Linda feels like reading, and I'm not in the darkroom or doing something else, I've been going through Mythbuster episodes, with my finger liberally on the fast forward button. It's like they think people will forget what was happening before the commercial break. Then again, given the stupidity of most commercials, maybe that's not a bad assumption. I'm enjoying it, though some of it is dated now. (How on earth is Kari Byron 50 years old??)

 I'm not entirely sold on the whole streaming idea, though I have to admit the sheer convenience can't be beat. The resume show button is a great idea, but the functioning is somewhat erratic. The search feature isn't much fun, and I can't stand the popup trailers and image resizing that happens as I scroll across the screen looking at the endless possibilities, most of which do not interest me. There's been a few times we can't find the show that was there just a minute ago. Part of the problem might be me fat thumbing the remote. Part of it seems to be a touch pad and very touchy. But then again, I like browsing for DVDs in the library, and I liked going to the rental store. 

All of this is making me wonder if I've turned the corner from being curmudgeonly to outright cranky geezer. E-mail, for example. It used to be a great thing. Now, not so much. Some of the traffic is useful, like getting told the amount and due date for a bill (although I prefer paper), or that a book on hold at the library is available for pickup. Lots of it lately is essentially business related to the affairs of my community association, and some of that is enough like work that it's bringing back memories. Very little of it is actually from a person that I know, on a purely personal topic. All together too much of it is spam. I don't even know how many rules exist in my email program to route things to a trash folder, and even then new things constantly come up, requiring a new rule. 

I am reminded of the time that the IT staff at the small company I worked at asked us to be mindful of the amount of mail we had accumulated, and to archive as much as we could, since that got treated differently for back up purposes. They published a shame list showing mail storage sorted by size. The guy at the top, who had more than twice as much as the next biggest account promptly solved the problem by deleting all his email folders, and sending out a note that he had lost all his mail due to an IT failure, and if anyone was expecting a note from him to resend the original. Amazingly enough he didn't get fired, and the IT staff promptly restored the deleted items. 

We are waiting for Telus to put in the super duper ultra high speed fibre network in our neighbourhood, and then I'll seriously consider turning off the nucleus email, and create a couple of Telus addresses and start over. I have email going back years, and I wonder why. At work it was to cover my ass and save rework. There's lots of times when people asked me where a particular file was, and I'd resend them the original reply, complete with headers. Yes, that was intended to be aggressive.

I can hear the kids out there looking puzzled, asking who does email anymore. Don't people text? (Or whatever apps the cool kids are doing now that I've never heard of.) Except I mostly think that texts are a degradation of language. Words and letters were invented because symbols weren't precise, and now people are going back to emoticons and emojis and god knows what else I'm unaware of, being a grumpy old geezer. Sigh. 

I'm told that in a text that starting a sentence with a capital letter, and ending with a period and a space, is aggressive and insulting. I have, but some haven't graduated from using 2 spaces at the end of a sentence because that's the way it was done in the typewriter era. (Typewriters are an obsolete way of putting letters onto paper.) 

Where was I? I'm coming to appreciate more the writings of previous grumpy old farts complaining about the younger generations. At least so far I haven't shouted out the front door, "Hey you kids get off my lawn!" Maybe next week.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Film

Linda

Newfoundland

Polar bears

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago