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Is Time the Most Valuable Resource a Kid Has That an Adult Doesn’t?
I’ve been thinking about this off and on for a few weeks now. It stemmed from multiple sources, but a comment from one of my fellow book club members really sparked the idea. We were talking about The Mandalorian—which, on 7 March when we had our meeting, had only aired one episode of the current season, its third—when my friend made the following paraphrased comment: In order to keep up with all the Star Wars content coming at us via movies, live-action TV, animated TV, comics, and video games, you’d almost have to be a teenager with no life in order to have the time to consume all this stuff.…
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Alaska Daily and The Company You Keep Prove Network TV Is Not Dead
A review of ABC TV's Alaska Daily and The Company You Keep
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Springsteen, Showing Your Age, and Knowing Your Truth
Yes, there was a vibe. Lots of middle-aged people, many with all-gray hair and loose, baggy clothes worn to hide bodies no longer as thin as fit as they were when The Boss ruled the airwaves in the Seventies and Eighties. Some wore concert t-shirts from ages past while others sported more modern Springsteen attire. A decent number of the concert goers were like me: attending the show with a younger person, hoping to introduce what it was like to see Springsteen the Showman fill an arena with sound and lead the fans in singing his songs. I chuckled as my son and I made our way to our seats.…
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Pushing the Old Guys Aside: HBO’s Perry Mason Season 1
I finally finished Season 1 of the updated and reimagined Perry Mason TV series on HBO Ma. Yeah, I know: I’m two years behind. There’s just too much good content to watch and not enough time. Here’s a funny thing: when I pulled it up on HBO Max late last week, my time stamp was halfway through episode three. I asked my wife if she’d be up for watching. She was and, without going back to re-watch the opening two installments, we forged ahead. The cheeky summation I’ve heard about this show is that it is not your grandfather’s Perry Mason. That’s certainly true, both in the language and the…
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Poker Face and the Spiritual Reboot
Poker Face had me at Rian Johnson. But had I not known it was his brainchild, the show would have had me at the title font. That yellow font on the title card, the year represented by Roman numerals. What decade are we in? Well, the headspace of creator Rian Johnson was the 1970s and 1980s with shows like Colombo and The Rockford Files. I suspect he gets nostalgically triggered when he sees the title cards of those shows and others and wanted to bring sensibility forward to the 2020s. What sensibility is that? A traditional crime-of-the-week series. But not just that: a new crime every week with a whole…
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It’s Never Too Late to Restart Resolutions and Habits
How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along? I saw a statistic that said by today—Day 36 of 2023—a shocking 80% or more people have already given up on the resolutions they so fervently made at midnight on 1 January. Eighty percent. I think the figure is higher, to be honest. There’s even a holiday to help folks who waver on their resolutions. It’s called National Quitter’s Day and that was back on 13 January. As I wrote back in December, I had certain personal goals—okay, let’s just call them habits, okay? That’s what they really are—that I wanted to do in January. I started re-reading the Psalms (one a…
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Reading Into The Dark
At least nine times a year, I start a book with zero knowledge about it. And it’s wonderful We’re all readers here, right? How do you usually pick that next book to read? If we’re in a brick-and-mortar store, we look at the cover, we note the author, read that all-so-important description, and then maybe a few pages of chapter one. If we’re online, all of that is still present, but we get the added bonus of that preview. We can actually read the entire preview before we make that purchase decision. Oh, and then there are the reviews—from professionals as well as amateurs. In every step of this process,…
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The End of New Amsterdam and the Twilight of Network TV for a Gen Xer
One of my favorite TV shows ended its five-year run on Tuesday and I’m wondering if it’ll be the last great network show I watch. New Amsterdam Like Castle, New Amsterdam had me at the trailer. The show starred Ryan Eggold (whom I knew from The Blacklist) as Max Goodwin, the new medical director at New Amsterdam, the oldest public hospital in America (based on the real Bellevue hospital). Eggold’s performance on The Blacklist stood out, especially when he was in the same show as series star James Spader, but with Max, Eggold had a role to which he could bring his considerable charm and humanity. It didn’t hurt that…
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Intentional Reading
Do you ever feel left out of a conversation? It’s only mid-January and while the year is still brand-new, the old year still has a few remnants lingering. The biggest me for is the various Best Of lists still readily available. I read many of them—books, TV, movies, music—and made an interesting observation about the book ones: I read few of them and could not contribute to the conversation. I’m an avid reader I have anywhere from 2-5 books going on all at once. Well, let me clarify: I’m re-reading Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic in 2023 so I’m only reading a page a day, but it’s still active. I’m…
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When Life Throws Curve Balls at Your Resolutions
How are those resolutions coming along? It’s Day 7 of January 2023, a full week after many of us toasted the new year at midnight and resolved to make changes in our lives. Back in December, I wrote about making resolutions—or habit changes—with the guiding principle of “just try.” Most of us want to change something about ourselves—to become a better version of ourselves—so the first step is to decide to try. The next (and the next and the next) is to follow through. Depending on where you get your data, a large percentage of folks who make new year’s resolutions fail by February. One statistic I found was 80%.…