Just watched the West Wing episode with that title (not sure I've spelled it right, but it's late). It's an episode that really hangs together very well. It's a Thanksgiving episode, so the theme of people coming here to flee religious persecution is quite apt, but there's also the side theme of school prayer and how it can be used to persecute children if they choose to sit it out.
Yeah, I'm tired, I should go to bed. But I wanted to write something about it. It's the last episode on this particular DVD and I'll start something else tomorrow. In-between working on the Job From Hell, of course.
But I wanted to mention a passing thought that keeps passing and I keep forgetting to do something about it--I want to find the atheist charities. I know there was an atheists' group that a friend of mine started and it turned out to attract a lot of libertarians. And that's not the kind of people I want to be around. For one thing, I don't see atheism as a political thing. Maybe it's the Jew in me, but I want to find a group of atheists that want to make the world a better place. Of course, I suppose libertarians are trying to do that, I just don't agree with their perspective. But I mean that I want to find the people who are trying to feed people, cure their ills, take care of children...all those things that a lot of religious charities do, but without all the religious, I'll call it baggage. I believe that people can both be good and do good without believing in a deity and I think there are atheists out there who act in a civilized, humanistic, caring way and I want to try to join forces with them.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Okay, so sue me
I was going to try to keep this updated a bit more often than this, but oh, well.
Anyway, here's what's been going on. I made it through Season 1 of The West Wing. There's honestly not really a bad episode in the bunch, if you allow for it to be mostly fiction. I mean, it's about drama and comedy, people and how they interact with each other and it just happens to be taking place in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Anyway, the season cliffhanger was, of course, shots ringing out in Roslyn and we didn't know who'd been hit (which I took to mean, when I first saw this episode, that they hadn't completed contract negotiations for all the actors, but perhaps that was just me being a bit jaded).
When I finished that season, I finally found it in me to pop in Disk 1 of Children of Paradise, a movie I'd long heard of, but never seen. It's three hours long and I had to watch it in spurts, in-between working and stuff, but I found it very, very difficult to shut it down. It's a wonderful movie, simply marvelous. And gorgeous! I really, really loved it. I also watched the Terry Gilliam intro and I listened to the commentaries on both Part 1 and Part 2. This allowed me to concentrate on the actors faces and movements, instead of having to pay attention to the subtitles--which I still prefer to seeing a movie dubbed, though. I also watched the documentary on how they restored the movie.
I've packed up those disks and put them in the mailbox back to Netflix--but now I want my own copy. It's a wonderful Criterion set and, well, I just got La Belle et La Bete and now I want this film, too.
Of course, I do have another film from Netflix--Finding Neverland (I think that's the title)--but, no, it's time to start Season 2 of The West Wing. It's In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Part 1, and Josh has been wheeled into the emergency room (followed by Toby, CJ and Sam, as if they would have been allowed in there in real life-ha!) and we're into the first flashback. I have this fantasy that someday my friend who hates the show will come to me because she wants me to show her the required episodes so she can discuss it intelligently with someone. I'd show her the entire first season and the first two episodes of Season 2 and that should do it. Without the backstory that these first two eps give us, she'd be lost.
More later.
Anyway, here's what's been going on. I made it through Season 1 of The West Wing. There's honestly not really a bad episode in the bunch, if you allow for it to be mostly fiction. I mean, it's about drama and comedy, people and how they interact with each other and it just happens to be taking place in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Anyway, the season cliffhanger was, of course, shots ringing out in Roslyn and we didn't know who'd been hit (which I took to mean, when I first saw this episode, that they hadn't completed contract negotiations for all the actors, but perhaps that was just me being a bit jaded).
When I finished that season, I finally found it in me to pop in Disk 1 of Children of Paradise, a movie I'd long heard of, but never seen. It's three hours long and I had to watch it in spurts, in-between working and stuff, but I found it very, very difficult to shut it down. It's a wonderful movie, simply marvelous. And gorgeous! I really, really loved it. I also watched the Terry Gilliam intro and I listened to the commentaries on both Part 1 and Part 2. This allowed me to concentrate on the actors faces and movements, instead of having to pay attention to the subtitles--which I still prefer to seeing a movie dubbed, though. I also watched the documentary on how they restored the movie.
I've packed up those disks and put them in the mailbox back to Netflix--but now I want my own copy. It's a wonderful Criterion set and, well, I just got La Belle et La Bete and now I want this film, too.
Of course, I do have another film from Netflix--Finding Neverland (I think that's the title)--but, no, it's time to start Season 2 of The West Wing. It's In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Part 1, and Josh has been wheeled into the emergency room (followed by Toby, CJ and Sam, as if they would have been allowed in there in real life-ha!) and we're into the first flashback. I have this fantasy that someday my friend who hates the show will come to me because she wants me to show her the required episodes so she can discuss it intelligently with someone. I'd show her the entire first season and the first two episodes of Season 2 and that should do it. Without the backstory that these first two eps give us, she'd be lost.
More later.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Back to the blog
Okay, so it's been a couple of days and here's where things stand with the DVDs:
I'm back to The West Wing. I watched one episode of Danger: UXB and realized that I didn't need to see more. Sure, Anthony Andrews was lovely, but while I could understand him (mostly), many of the supporting cast were incomprehensible, plus the suspense was, you should pardon the pun, killing me. I mean, it's obvious they're not going to blow up their star in the first episode, but other guys...?
So the last couple of West Wing episodes that I've watched are the one where Edward James Olmos gets chosen to be a Supreme Court nominee (and Ken Howard plays a nasty, snooty guy--and we get the first hint of Charlie Young's numerous jobs prior to joining the White House staff, I think it's a joke that he did so many things--here, it was that he caddied for three summers at some country club; there is the hint that it was probably pretty exclusive, a theme that gets revisited in a later episode).
And the episode I started today is the first Christmas episode, where Toby gets called because a homeless guy dies on the Mall and he's wearing an old coat of Toby's that was given to Goodwill and it's got his card in his pocket. The storyline enables some exposition of Mrs. Landingham's past--that her twin sons rather improbably got killed in the same firefight in Vietnam in 1970 on Christmas Eve. (I say "improbably", because how likely is it that two brothers were assigned to the same part of Nam at the same time?)
Haven't gotten there yet, but I'm looking forward to the juxtaposition of the funeral with honor guard for the homeless veteran with the children's choir at the White House singing Little Drummer Boy.
I really, really wish they'd put together a "Music from The West Wing" CD set. Sigh.
I'm back to The West Wing. I watched one episode of Danger: UXB and realized that I didn't need to see more. Sure, Anthony Andrews was lovely, but while I could understand him (mostly), many of the supporting cast were incomprehensible, plus the suspense was, you should pardon the pun, killing me. I mean, it's obvious they're not going to blow up their star in the first episode, but other guys...?
So the last couple of West Wing episodes that I've watched are the one where Edward James Olmos gets chosen to be a Supreme Court nominee (and Ken Howard plays a nasty, snooty guy--and we get the first hint of Charlie Young's numerous jobs prior to joining the White House staff, I think it's a joke that he did so many things--here, it was that he caddied for three summers at some country club; there is the hint that it was probably pretty exclusive, a theme that gets revisited in a later episode).
And the episode I started today is the first Christmas episode, where Toby gets called because a homeless guy dies on the Mall and he's wearing an old coat of Toby's that was given to Goodwill and it's got his card in his pocket. The storyline enables some exposition of Mrs. Landingham's past--that her twin sons rather improbably got killed in the same firefight in Vietnam in 1970 on Christmas Eve. (I say "improbably", because how likely is it that two brothers were assigned to the same part of Nam at the same time?)
Haven't gotten there yet, but I'm looking forward to the juxtaposition of the funeral with honor guard for the homeless veteran with the children's choir at the White House singing Little Drummer Boy.
I really, really wish they'd put together a "Music from The West Wing" CD set. Sigh.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Keeping up
Okay, I've decided to try to blog more often. (Yeah, sure.) No, really. (Uh-huh.) Well, I'm gonna try, anyway.
Here's what I'm thinking. I'm going to write about what DVDs I'm watching--and for the next week or two, I can also write about TV, since I'm watching my upstairs neighbors' cat, the wonderful Tito, and they have cable.
So far, I've actually made two trips up there to both spend some quality time with poor, lonely Tito and watch ... Ace of Cakes. (No. Really?) Yes, really. There are few shows that I've really missed while I've been sans cable and that was one of them. If Jeopardy! weren't probably in reruns or having a Teen Tournament or something, I'd probably get up there for that, too. Ace of Cakes is so much fun, though. I keep wishing I had the money to get them to make a cake for me...or, my fantasy is to have one for Susan's birthday and it'd be a mah jongg cake.
Anyway, tonight, I went up to watch The Man Who Came To Dinner, a movie I've seen umpteen times and just adore. Oddly, it makes me think of another cat--my mother and stepfather had a cat show up one evening for dinner, so they named him Sherry. I was one of the few people who recognized the allusion right away, my stepfather said.
He was a really nice cat, I wish he'd picked a better place to adopt. I'm not sure what happened to him, in the end--he probably just got old and passed on, but I don't know or remember how or why and I think it's probably just as well. I know they took lousy care of their other cat and I think she suffered through neglect. It's not that they don't love animals, it's that the pair of them really have no idea how to take care of them. Which is not surprising about my mother, she didn't really know how to take care of me. Aaron never had any kids of his own and he's not doing a great job today taking care of my mother or himself.
Boy, that was an interesting segue. If I were sitting in a therapist's office, she'd be having a field day. Anyway, I wanted to also mention that I recently started rewatching The West Wing series. I just keep going through all seven seasons, it's like an addiction. But if I'm in-between movies or other series from Netflix, then I just start in again. I do have a couple of things from Netflix at the moment, but I'm going to wait until I'm done with the West Wing disk I have in the player right now and then I'll watch one of them. It's still the first season and it's interesting to see how they're still figuring things out in terms of how the White House works (or at least how they'd like it to work) and so there's people involved in discussions that they probably aren't in real life and there's sets of places that don't seem to exist even within the reality, such as it is, of the show. But I know it gets better. Then it gets worse, but then it gets better again. I'm hoping to blog my way through it.
In-between, I'll be watching a movie I've heard a lot about over the years but which I've never seen--Children of Paradise. It's in two DVDs! I'm a bit nervous about it, I'm not sure what it is and I wasn't in the mood for tackling it last week, so that's why I started back in on The West Wing. But now another series is here in its little red envelope, an old British thing with a young Anthony Andrews--Danger: UXB. I wonder if I'll still like it.
Here's what I'm thinking. I'm going to write about what DVDs I'm watching--and for the next week or two, I can also write about TV, since I'm watching my upstairs neighbors' cat, the wonderful Tito, and they have cable.
So far, I've actually made two trips up there to both spend some quality time with poor, lonely Tito and watch ... Ace of Cakes. (No. Really?) Yes, really. There are few shows that I've really missed while I've been sans cable and that was one of them. If Jeopardy! weren't probably in reruns or having a Teen Tournament or something, I'd probably get up there for that, too. Ace of Cakes is so much fun, though. I keep wishing I had the money to get them to make a cake for me...or, my fantasy is to have one for Susan's birthday and it'd be a mah jongg cake.
Anyway, tonight, I went up to watch The Man Who Came To Dinner, a movie I've seen umpteen times and just adore. Oddly, it makes me think of another cat--my mother and stepfather had a cat show up one evening for dinner, so they named him Sherry. I was one of the few people who recognized the allusion right away, my stepfather said.
He was a really nice cat, I wish he'd picked a better place to adopt. I'm not sure what happened to him, in the end--he probably just got old and passed on, but I don't know or remember how or why and I think it's probably just as well. I know they took lousy care of their other cat and I think she suffered through neglect. It's not that they don't love animals, it's that the pair of them really have no idea how to take care of them. Which is not surprising about my mother, she didn't really know how to take care of me. Aaron never had any kids of his own and he's not doing a great job today taking care of my mother or himself.
Boy, that was an interesting segue. If I were sitting in a therapist's office, she'd be having a field day. Anyway, I wanted to also mention that I recently started rewatching The West Wing series. I just keep going through all seven seasons, it's like an addiction. But if I'm in-between movies or other series from Netflix, then I just start in again. I do have a couple of things from Netflix at the moment, but I'm going to wait until I'm done with the West Wing disk I have in the player right now and then I'll watch one of them. It's still the first season and it's interesting to see how they're still figuring things out in terms of how the White House works (or at least how they'd like it to work) and so there's people involved in discussions that they probably aren't in real life and there's sets of places that don't seem to exist even within the reality, such as it is, of the show. But I know it gets better. Then it gets worse, but then it gets better again. I'm hoping to blog my way through it.
In-between, I'll be watching a movie I've heard a lot about over the years but which I've never seen--Children of Paradise. It's in two DVDs! I'm a bit nervous about it, I'm not sure what it is and I wasn't in the mood for tackling it last week, so that's why I started back in on The West Wing. But now another series is here in its little red envelope, an old British thing with a young Anthony Andrews--Danger: UXB. I wonder if I'll still like it.
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