Making A Hash Of It

     Down the hall, Tam is enjoying the first of the Sunday morning political talk shows.  "They will be lit," she told me, which is apparently a good thing.  It's certainly going to give the pundit class something to other than hanging out on Washington, D.C. streetcorners, offering to debate passers-by for small change.

     Me, I'm onto food.  Having come into a little money thanks to a small across-the-board bonus at work,* on Friday I was at a Meijer store, which is sort of what Walmart would be if it was a little nicer, or a super Target with no sense of style and a much better grocery section.  And in that grocery section, they routinely stock corned beef brisket!

     It may not be gourmet fare, but if you bake one in a covered pan with a little water over a slow grill for three and a half hours, adding potatoes, carrots, celery and cabbage for the last half of that, you've got a meal to be reckoned with -- and leftovers!  Supper was fine last night.  We started in on the current season of The Diplomat, which is only a little weird for me: Keri Russell bears a strong resemblance to my older sister at the same age, and watching your own sister as the U.S. Ambassador to the UK is...disconcerting.  Big sis has been doing an okay job of it so far, though.

     This morning, a couple of Yukon Gold potatoes and about the third of the leftover corned beef, diced, made some of the best corned beef hash I've had in a long time.  And I've still got more corned beef in the freezer to do something else with, by and by.  Possibly soup.
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* I'm not entirely sure why, and rather than bite the hand that feeds me with unflattering speculation, I'll assume it's because we all took our unpaid furloughs during the pandemic without much complaint.

Match Cuts

     Tamara and I have been enjoying the current season of The Lincoln Lawyer.  (The TV series; I have yet to see the film, with a different cast.)  Taken from the novels starring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller by mystery writer Michael Connelly, not only are the stories first-rate, they're brilliantly shot and edited.  One of the best parts is the use of "match cuts," in which scene-to-scene transitions go from one similar thing to another.

     The simplest is a sky shot: characters are conversing, the camera tilts up to the sky, there's a quick dissolve to another image of the sky and the camera tilts back down on a new scene.  A little trickier is the not-quite-match: famously, in Lawrence of Arabia, the camera goes in close on a lit match (a literal match, and there's your double pun) and as Lawrence blows out the flame, the film cuts to sunrise on the desert horizon.  It's easy to overdo,* but the best match cuts are as smooth as silk.  In an example from the TV series, a group of attorneys around a conference table in their office discussing trial strategy cuts to them at the Defense table in court, using those strategies -- a leap that covers days if not weeks, and keeps the story moving.

     Scenes in the series are carefully composed and lit, and often lushly shot, moving to a more documentary style when the action happens in a prison or low-rent lawyer's office.  The visual style is as deft and inevitable-seeming as a dancer's movements.

     One of the most interesting things to me is that while Connelly's plots are intriguingly twisty and his storytelling is more than adequate, he's not a bowl-you-over prose stylist.  He was a newspaper reporter and he writes like a reporter, without fuss or flourish.  The TV series is very much on their own hook with the cinematography and editing; trying to show Mickey Haller's world, they have picked up a visual style that suits their protagonist and his Los Angeles like a well-tailored suit.
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* There's a version in which dialog carries across the cut, one character's sentence finished or answered by another, often to dramatic effect.  Occasionally, a film or TV show will cut back and forth between two parallel scenes multiple times to build tension, but it's difficult to pull off without being too obvious.  The animated spy comedy Archer frequently plays carried dialog for laughs.

About Weapons

     In the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, Captain James T. Kirk has to fight Spock with a Vulcan "lirpa," a spear-sized weapon with a heavy weight at one end and a fan-shaped blade on the other.  It's a nasty-looking thing, but consider: the weapons used by most cultures are hunting and farming tools, adapted for war.

     What good is a gadget with a hammer or bludgeon at one and and a slicer at the other?  Clearly, it's for a creature like a mussel or an oyster, but much larger: Spock's ancestors would hunt the dry and dusty bottoms of the dead seas of Vulcan until they found the buried lair of the Giant Vulcan Clam, dig down to it, give the beast a sharp rap on the shell with the heavy end and it either cracks or opens up to see what all the fuss is, at which point the hunter's helper pours in a bucket of salt and hot sauce (or possibly Worcestershire) while the hunter reverses the lirpa and scoops the thing out with the sharp end: dee-lish!

     Of course, Star Trek's Vulcans are vegetarians, and per the fictional future history, they have been for thousands of years.  The huge molluscs the lirpa was invented to hunt are probably extinct.  But once upon a time, long ago...!

Some Circus

     The ringmasters -- there were two -- mostly looked bored, except when a pie fight broke out between a clumsy magician and a fake strongman with cardboard weights.  A sad clown led out a poodle on a string, walking on its hind legs, but it didn't do any other tricks.  The Human Cannonball promised several times to launch himself the entire length of the Big Top, but he kept falling well short and missing the net.  He even complained about it, saying, "The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact-check."

     The acts didn't strike me as especially well-rehearsed.  Yes, I'm talking about the debate and while I think Senator Vance lost on facts, especially his refusal to admit Mr. Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election and in claiming the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio under Temporary Protected Status are "illegals" (they're not), I wasn't impressed.  I think Governor Walz would do okay if he had to step up to the big job; I'm not too sure J. D. Vance has the chops.  Tim Walz and his opponent would have both benefited from doing more interviews with neutral to hostile press -- and so would we.

     These two are what we have.  Their running mates are what we have.  Most voters have made their decision already.

Kaos?

     Netflix released a series in August that I happened on last night.  Kaos retells Greco-Roman myth, apparently (and very loosely) the story of Eurydice and Orpheus (and perhaps others), starting with Jeff Goldblum as an insecure Zeus.

     The world of the series is modern times with a twist: the gods are real and the cities and nations are those of myth.

     This makes for a Pratchettesque environment, including absolutely unrestrained party-boy Dionysus and a grocery store breakfast cereal aisle stocked with Spartan Crunch, Gaea's Granola and Achilles' Heels.  The casting has the potential to go very weird -- in much the same way as Greco-Roman mythology itself: the deities and heroes of Classic myth were a bunch of stone freaks.  (Yes, yes, Medusa, sit back down.  You'll have your turn.)

     I've seen not quite half of the first episode and along with the story, there's some suspense wondering if the showrunners can continue to juggle ancient and modern elements.  It's a delicate trick and it can go badly wrong.  But so far, so good, and if you ever wondered about Zeus and Hera's home life or just how scary Cassanda was in person, here's your answer.

Who We Used To Be

     I stumbled across a 1950s police drama inspired by Dragnet: in Code 3, real-life stories from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office are dramatized, in much the same valorizing manner.

     The officers in Dragnet and Code 3 were supposed the represent the best elements of American law enforcement, and while you can easily fault them for being goody-two-shoes and papering over the worse aspects of the profession, ignoring the harsher treatment often encountered by people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale and the leniency expected by those at the top, the programs represented an aspiration, showing the police not, perhaps, so much as they were as who they were supposed to be.

     Even taking all that into account, the first episode of Code 3 had me doing a double-take.  In it, a former member of the Czech underground, now a naturalized U. S. citizen is going though training to become a deputy.  Older than the others, driven, he's too rough in hand-to-hand training and too outspoken in the classroom.  Sent out to observe with a pair of experienced deputies, he's furious when they break up a fight among truck drivers and shrug off (and diffuse) hostile comments from the separated combatants by refusing to take them seriously.  "Why do those people not show us respect?"  He shoves one driver who directs a comment to him; the guy reacts angrily, the trainee's hand creeps towards his holster and the situation is briefly tense until he's told to stand down.

     In the patrol car afterward, the deputies explain that in this country, an unarmed citizen feels safe talking back to law enforcement, and that it is a point of pride.  "Those guys were just blowing off steam.  We sent them on their way and didn't have to arrest anyone."

     He struggles with that; plot complications and so on follow, but in the end, in the course of a dramatic confrontation with another immigrant from Eastern Europe, he comes to terms with the way policing works in the U.S. and is on his way to a career serving public safety.

     So, tell me -- just how comfortable would you feel talking back to a police officer today?  How comfortable with it, really, were truck drivers in 1950s LA County, and was it more or less so than their counterparts are now?  How much respect does a police officer or sheriff's deputy expect these days, and how much disrespect will they treat as semi-amusing routine?  And what kind of behavior does our entertainment media model for officers and the public along those lines?

The Past Was A Different Country

     The loss of every single electronic parts place in Indianapolis still gnaws at me.  We had so much, and now there's nothing.  Likewise, our homegrown supermarket chains and department stores have faded -- Eavey's (I may have misremembered the name), O'Malia's, Marsh, Block's, L. S. Ayres -- all gone.

     The little independent used book stores are almost all gone, too, and most of them went away before Half-Price Books moved into the vacant niche.  Don't get me wrong; I like HPB a lot and I hope they stick around.  But I grew up going to the crowded old stores, filling a paper grocery bag with beat-up paperbacks for five dollars (about thirty bucks in 2024 money) and reading for a month.  You'd take the books you didn't like back for credit against the next bagful.  Broad Ripple's Book Exchange was a good one, but it faded away.  Most of them didn't make much profit, a bare living for the owner after rent and utilities, a haven for a bibliophile.

     It's easy to turn nostalgic, longing for a lost past.  But we forget the bad parts -- I was working in small-town radio, at bare-living wages.  That fiver for a bag of books was a luxury expense.  Ramen was a staple and fast food was a rare treat.

     Watching a documentary about the the Star Trek universe of TV shows and films, I encountered mention of an episode of Deep Space 9 that features the staff of a late-1940s or early '50s science fiction magazine -- with the cast of DS9 playing all the roles, out of makeup and costume.  I'd never heard of it, and in this age of streaming and on-demand video, it took thirty seconds and $1.99 to call it up.  A far cry from that five-dollar bag of used books!

     Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess used similar conceits a few times, Hercules in humorous self-mockery.  "Far Beyond the Stars" is not played for laughs.  Benjamin Sisko, as "Benny Russell" is an SF writer, alongside cast members playing writers modeled on Isaac Asimov, William Tenn and other Futurians, possibly Eric Frank Russell and Damon Knight, C. L. Moore and Andre Norton, under an editor who looks a bit like John W. Campbell, working in a "writer's room" (something TV programs have and SF magazines quite definitely do not; but I'll give them that).  Without giving too much away, the storyline sends an overstressed Sisko into hallucinating or dreaming events that roughly parallel what happened when Samuel R. Delany's novel Nova, already headed for hardback publication by Doubleday, was rejected for serialization in Analog magazine in 1967.

     Galaxy magazine and a few of that time's bigger names in printed SF are namechecked and it's a well-made episode, with levels of resonance that connect the story-within-a-story to the larger arc of DS9.  And it's a reminder that the past was far from halcyon.

Dr. Zarkov? Dr. Huer, Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard?

     My reference to "Dr. Zharkov" yesterday prompted a response -- I'd combined Buck Rogers with Flash Gordon!  It wouldn't be the first time those two science fictional universes have crossed paths; parts of sets and costumes from one character's 1930s serials showed up in the other's.

     For the record, Buck Rogers gets his fancy tech from Dr. Huer in the books and TV show; Flash Gordon's scientific wizard is Dr. Zarkov, no h.

     Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine and Dr. Howard?  I'll let them answer for themselves.

Speaking Of Broadcasting

      I have long preferred to listen to radio news in the morning while I catch up on dishes,* make breakfast and rearrange the kitchen clutter.  These days, there's not a lot of news on the radio in Indianapolis, so it's the local NPR station† or nothing, unless I dig out a shortwave receiver and go hunting.

     This morning, closing a long story about an Olympic field hockey player who had part of a broken finger amputated rather than repaired so he could make it to the Paris Olympics, NPR played nearly all of what sounded like the John Williams arrangement of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream," the inspiring fanfare used for most U. S. network TV coverage of the Olympics since 1964, across two different networks.  The TV networks are protective of it; NBC was a few years getting the rights to the music after they wrestled Olympic coverage away from ABC and if you decide it'd be a great accompaniment to your "Olympics tire sale" commercial, better lawyer up and buckle in for a bumpy ride that will end in a crash.  Public radio sometimes gets a pass, on a "You wouldn't hit a skinny kid with glasses, would you?" basis and a tenuous extension of Fair Use: even big corporations don't like to get caught looking like a bully.  Or they may have worked something out with NBC, which is effectively out of the radio network business these days.

     One thing for sure: every time I hear those big kettledrums lead into that uplifting theme from the brasses, it chokes me up.  And I'm not even much of a sports fan. (Here's an interesting piece on music for the Olympics, with plenty of examples.)
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* Judge me if you must, but several dropped ceramic mugs, drinking glasses and nice plates back, I decided that if I was sleepy, I wasn't going to do the dishes after dinner, just scrape them, rinse them and let them soak until morning.  It was the trying to sort out razor-sharp shards from slippery, soapy silverware while sleepy that convinced me.
 
† They've got a local news department as least as good as the best county-seat AMs had forty years ago, which counts as pretty darned good these days. Without a subscription to the crumbling, tattered remains of the local newspaper, how else would I find out about scandals involving city government officials?

Living In A Glass House

     There's limited room on the airwaves.  Digital TV made it easier to get more signals into the same channels -- and the FCC promptly stacked stations closer together to make more room for police radio and commercial users.*  Mostly-analog FM and AM† is even more pressed for space, with an array of technological fixes helping to find and fill in available slots anywhere there's enough of an audience to turn a profit.

     Radio and TV spectrum is a limited resource.  You can run out of it.  It's not like newspapers (just print more!) or cable TV (filled up one wire?  Run another -- or use fiber-optic for more bandwidth) or the Internet (make more webpages, run fatter data pipes!).  So the government regulates it via the FCC and one of the things they have required since early on is transparency: stations have to ID themselves with every transmission and you've always been able to go look up which owners go with what call letters. 

     Broadcasting is a big megaphone, and broadcast stations have to prove they're of some use to their community.  The way that happens is by a thing called a "Public File."  It used to be an actual file at the studios that anyone could show up during business hours and leaf through; now it's an electronic file, accessible through the stations website and the FCC's as well.  In it you'll find the current license (including ownership information) and any applications pending with the FCC, agreements the station has made with citizens (usually advocacy groups), contracts, complaints, details of political broadcasts, a copy of the FCC's guidebook The Public and Broadcasting, a list of issues and of programs that address them (including children's programming), and so on.  "And so on" has for years included EEO requirements: equal opportunity in employment.  There aren't any hiring quotas, but the FCC wants stations to make sure they're reaching out to all qualified applicants when they have job openings.  And they used to require stations keep track of staff demographics, and post that information in their public file.  Twenty years ago, that requirement was dropped (at least for radio stations) due to a court case, but time marches on and they were able to reinstate it recently.

     Of course a station owner objected.  Remember, there aren't any quotas; the FCC just wants that data out there so the general public can see it, along with all the other information about how the station has addressed matters of public interest and who's running the place.  But that's too much for the folks who run "theDove" and they've filed suit to block it.  The NAB loathes the notion, too, and have filed their own lawsuit. 

     I don't know.  Over-the-air radio and TV stations are using a scarce resource, and nobody's keeping them from making money; but since they're getting to use the public's airwaves (and at a pretty cheap price, too), the public deserves to get some direct benefit, and the public ought to be able to check how the sausage is made, too.   It doesn't seem out of line to include demographic data not linked to names.  NAB suggests it may enable doxxing individuals, and I will leave it to readers to decide if that's a genuine concern or a legal stratagem.

     Radio and TV stations are allowed a disproportionately-loud voice, and subjecting them to a greater degree of scrutiny in return is about as close to fair as we're going to get.
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* Yes, it's true.  UHF TV, which used to end at channel 83, now stops at channel 36, just shy of the channel 37 spot that was never used: radio astronomy finds 608 - 614 MHz useful and above that, it's all cops, military, Feds, fire departments, ambulances, phones and so on.
 
† There is, kind of, available room on the AM band these days, but it's more like vacant buildings than wide open spaces -- and decrepit buildings, at that.  An AM radio station is a big pile of sunk costs, especially the antenna tower(s) and ground system, costly to build, expensive to maintain and vulnerable to theft.  But AM listenership has been declining for years and advertising revenue has followed.  If you ever wanted to own an AM radio station, now's the time; but the way to make a small fortune with an AM station is to start out with a large fortune and be very, very frugal.

I Know The Face, But The Character...?

     Last night, Tam and I watched the Pete Gunn episode, "A Slight Touch of Homicide," with the remarkable Howard McNear as the bad guy.

     You probably know him as Floyd the barber from Andy Griffith, a vague, odd, garrulous character, and you may have wondered why Floyd can seem almost menacing at times.  Without giving too much away, his role in the noir PI series shows that darker side to wonderful effect.  It's well worth watching, thirty minutes of tightly-scripted drama.  And you'll never feel quite the same way about Floyd again.

Debate Night

     It looks as if it will happen tonight: the big Presidential debate, Mr. Trump vs. Mr. Biden.  Polls say sixty percent of us will tune in.

     Both men claim to be raring to go.  My expectations are low; one man is 78 and the other is 81.  One struggles with a lifelong stammer and the other tends to ramble.  Having their microphones muted while the other candidate is speaking is widely pointed out as likely to frustrate Donald Trump more than Joe Biden but they're both used to people having to listen whenever they speak.

     The debate still might not happen.  If it does, it could be a huge mess.  One candidate might come off as more alert and focused than the other -- but these are not young men and neither is an especially polished speaker.  I suspect, barring anything really glaring, people will see whatever they expect to see and tomorrow will bring both sides claiming victory.

     It's more like an announcement of new car models in a year where no major changes are being made: we all know who we think these men are; they're going to step onstage in their best debate suits, and they're both going to try to show off their best angles.  If you're a Ford* fan, you're going to like the Ford; if you're a Chevy fan, you're going to like the Chevy.  And even without anything startlingly new, you're going to want to watch.
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* The car company, not the President between Nixon and Carter.

Frame By Frame

     Nostalgia over-the-air broadcaster MeTV, which rose to prominence by distributing a pitch-perfect simulation of an independent TV station from the late 1960s - 70s* as one of the extra "dot channels" on digital TV, has introduced MeTV Toons, an over-the-air, 24/7 channel of nothing but animation, everything from Bugs Bunny to Scooby-doo.

     I may never leave the house.

     Over-the-air TV has reached the point where in a lot of the country, it offers slightly more variety than most cable TV systems did in the 1970s.  Throw in streaming for TV and movies on demand, sports and some "premium" shows and you've got more entertainment than would have been conceivable back then, most of it free or inexpensive.
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* The reason they do that so well is because they are one; owner Weigel Broadcasting became the last independent TV station in Chicago in the mid-1990s after having been a hardscrabble UHF station picking up scraps from the big guys (WGN and WPWR) since 1964.  Along the way, they branched out into early low-power TV and needed separate programming to feed those stations.  When TV stations started filling up their leftover bandwidth after the digital conversion in 2009, Weigel was able to get in on the ground floor.

The Same Old Future

     The run of too-hot-to-stay-outside weather -- along with current trends -- has reminded me of LA 2017, a brilliant (at the time) science-fictional episode of the TV series The Name of the Game.  From the stifling orange smog that has forced survivors underground to inept corporatized government to advanced technology delivered in barely-useful crappified forms, the broad outlines are a little too familiar even as the details are hopelessly dated.

     Our modern times may have more in common with the world of John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar, in which an overheated, over-hyped media environment makes reality a thing only distantly glimpsed and despair an epidemic.  His world, another late '60s - early '70s look at the future, had too many people in too little space; ours still has room to stretch out but too often, we're standing knee-deep in bullshit and being told it smells like roses.

     It doesn't.  It never did -- you've got to manure the roses to make 'em grow, but that's not the scent anyone pursues.

     Those were lousy futures.  We should stop trying quite so hard to make them real.

Compression, Time, Rest

     All the above on Saturday, plus...the online writer's group.  That's not physical activity, but it wore me out nonetheless.  I napped in the afternoon, puttered around, had a little dinner, looked at television and went to bed.  As of Saturday night, my left ankle was not nearly as swollen but the bruise is still tender and aching.

     Television: Tam and I watched Ted Lasso all the way though over the last several weeks and enjoyed it.  I started not knowing much, and between "sports comedy" and "former Saturday Night Live Comic," my expectations were very low: sophomoric, mean humor, probably gross humor, slapstick--  Instead, it was as kind-spirited a sitcom as I have seen since The Dick Van Dyke Show or maybe Andy Griffith.  Oh, there was a little slapstick, seamlessly part of the story, and one zillionaire was pure caricature; but it was a darned good series, and left me better-disposed towards my fellow humans.

     We're now watching Three-Body Problem, in which at least some humans don't acquit themselves quite so well.  It's fascinating, and said to be heavily adapted from the original.  It's slightly old-fashioned, slightly Campbellian save-the-world science fiction and I can see why the books managed to break out of their home market, China.

Television Has Not Always Been Here

     "Kids today..."  Thanks to the Web (what you know as "the Internet" is mostly the World Wide Web, and we had an Internet long before that), thanks to streaming, thanks to handheld devices from smartphones to pads, it seems as if instant visual media has always been a thing.

     It hasn't.  I'm old enough to remember when TV told us about the big stories at six p.m., and added "film at eleven" for most of them; behind the scenes, a continuous-process developer was running at full speed and photojournalists were splicing the still-damp film, betting the edits would get though the projector without coming apart.  Live remote broadcasts were few and usually scheduled far in advance, microwave (or Bell Telephone) technical magic requiring engineers at both ends just to get the connection running.

     In 1945, few American cities had a TV station.  A couple had two or three, and stations in Philadelphia, New York City and Schenectady had linked up via Bell Telephone coaxial cable to present live coverage of the 1940 Republican Convention; the Democrats held their convention in Chicago that year and the video lines didn't go that far.  (In 1944, both parties held their conventions in Chicago, away from the coasts -- and any possibility of widespread TV coverage.)  Going into WW II, TV set sales had been disappointingly low: they were monumentally expensive, and most people lived outside the range of the existing stations.  Once the war began, manufacturing of consumer TVs was shut down for the duration.

     So when I had podcasts playing for background noise this morning and NPR's Ari Shapiro opened Consider This by telling me, "On August 6, 1945, a stone-faced President Harry Truman appeared on television and told Americans about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima," I was....puzzled.

     There was a TV station in the nation's capitol in 1945: Dumont's W3XWT got on the air that May, running a test pattern and a recording asking viewers to call the station.  No one had done so until Japan surrendered in August,* when Dumont's Thomas Goldsmith wrote "War is over" on a slide that replaced the test pattern, and the U. S. Navy picked up the phone to ask what all this TV stuff was about.

     Sorry, Ari; that video of a grim-faced President Truman telling Americans about the atomic bomb is from a newsreel, and most people didn't see it until they were at the movies, days or weeks after the bomb was dropped, by which time they'd already heard the news on the radio or read it in the newspaper.

     You -- and I -- grew up in a world of television. of images from all around the globe that have steadily become more immediate and vivid.  I could make a live video call to Tasmania or Mumbai right now, as easily as I'm typing this blog post, and it's no big deal.  But it wasn't always that way.  There was a time when hardly anyone had a glowing screen in their home (let alone their hand!) and the few who did, didn't get much over it.  And it was only a long lifetime ago.

     The NPR piece is about the descendants of the people who were downwind (and unwarned) of the Trinity test, families with long histories of cancer -- and zero compensation from the government.  They deserve better than to have their stories undermined by a lack of attention to detail.
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*  Announced on 15 August, though not formally signed until 2 September.

"Getting Hit On The Head Lessons"

     I replaced the Amazon Fire Stick streaming device on my bedroom TV last month.  The old one was struggling to keep up.  The slightly different menu structure of the new one led me to discover Prime Video offered Mannix in their free programs.

     The series takes heat for the number of times the lead character gets hit over the head.  I didn't remember much about it, but I thought it might be instructive to watch, since I'm writing a little PI fiction these days.

     It's instructive, all right.  While Mike Conners as "Joe Mannix" does get hit on the head enough in the first few episodes to lead to a lifetime of career-ending traumatic brain injury trouble (and takes bad beatings all over, too), that's not the only lesson to learn.  The first season writing is remarkably lazy.  It's not incompetent; story continuity's good, the characters aren't especially thin for 1960s - 70s TV.  And the actors are okay; Conners can carry off the role well even in hokey scenes, sets that wouldn't have been out of place in the campy TV Batman and contrived fight sequences (why do groups of bad guys always attack one at a time?).  But major plot points turn on coincidence and blind luck; normal police procedure is waved off when the hero and his associates even bother to wait around for law enforcement after leaving dead bodies on the scene; somehow, Mannix knows every mid-level mobster and small-time crook in LA, in depth and detail.  There's a little support for the last item, given that the first season has him working for "Intertect," a highly-computerized PI firm...in a time long before centralized, interconnected databases and high-tech piracy made the kind of snooping and probing the company apparently does even possible.  Later seasons have him striking out on his own, which is likely given the amount of grief he causes his tolerant boss at Intertect and the way his methods clash with theirs.

     The series is pulpy stuff, even by the standards of the time, and Season 1 was shot on a budget that leads to repeated use of the same interior sets, redressed (all LA apartments appear to have the same layout), but the plot holes big enough to back his various custom cars through are the real problem.  Action  and acting skills can only go so far in covering for them, and it's a real lesson in how not to keep the audience engaged when you tell a story.  Serendipity happens -- but nobody can make a living relying on it and any detective worthy of the title views it with extreme skepticism.  Just ask Philip Marlow or Sam Spade, who were working that coast long before Joe Mannix first got bopped behind the ear with a length of pipe.  Or Harry "Get off your ass and go knock on doors" Bosch, who is a lot more careful about who he lets sneak up behind him.

     Still, the jazzy theme music and fast-moving plots do have their appeal; but it's junk food, filling but not nourishing.

The Past Is A Foreign Land

     Watching an old episode of the delightful TV pulp The Wild, Wild West that used faked voodoo and a wide array of 19th-Century quackery as plot MacGuffins, which the intrepid heroes West and Gordon mostly scorn from the outset, it struck me:

     It's hard to believe how skeptical a people we once were.

     A lot of us will fall for about anything these days.

Bright Moon

     The Moon was shining through high, mottled clouds last night.  I tried a few photos with my phone but it doesn't have the lens for for the job.

     It still annoys me that there aren't any city lights up there.  Let alone a hotel.

     Tam and I have been watching For All Mankind, the Apple TV alternate history in which the Soviet Union beat the U. S. to land the first man on the moon, setting Alexi Leonov down between Apollo 10's close-enough-to-touch dress rehearsal (yes, that really happened) and the Apollo 11 landing.

     In the series, the USSR space program's Chief Designer Sergei Korolev survived instead of dying during surgery in 1966.  Maybe he hadn't been sent to a gulag and worked over in the alternate universe; they haven't said.

     The series takes real social issues of the day (it starts in 1969 and by the start of second season, it's up to 1983) and lets them play out against the background of ongoing, competitive Lunar explorations, a working Skylab supported by Space Shuttles as originally planned, and a Cold War that may be teetering closer to the brink than the real one ever came.  If you get all hot under the collar about DEI, it may not be your cup of tea; if you didn't live through those years or study recent history, you may have a little trouble keeping up.  But the series, so far, is a great example of how to tell a thrilling hard-SF story, character-driven and full of moments that carry what the late Sir Terry Pratchett called "narrative inevitability."  There's a lot of promise and a lot of payoff.

     It brings back the excitement I remember from the Apollo years.  We were landing on the Moon!  Giant rockets were thundering into the sky!  I still remember the family vacation when were traveling up an interstate nearly on the other side of Florida during an Apollo launch.  Cars began pulling over and stopping, and so did we, to watch the huge rocket making its way, a pillar of flame climbing heavenward.

     Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy a good story.  Alas, in the end, it is only a story.  The Russians never got there.  We didn't stay on the Moon.  There's no hotel.  Yet.

Advernoping

     Exactly how un-dialed-in does an ad agency have to be in order to feature a happy, smiling man buying a nearly all-white bicycle in a commercial for some kind of financial services?

     Out here in the real world, those things serve as a reminder to be aware along with their memorial function.  I guess it all blurs together for some folks.