Last year BBC America had it’s own program called Copper. It’s a good show about cops and killers in New York in 1864. Ripper Street is a BBC show that looks and feels a bit like Copper. It’s the story of cops, whores, and steam-punk CSI. The BBC is a bit more graphic in it’s display of mutilated bodies than CSI and the high tech used to solve crimes is a microscope instead of a laser. Like most cop shows we have a Crime, a Detective, and a Solution. The window dressing is Victorian London, Whitechapel to be specific. The…
Tag: glory days
Kill The Irishman
Good old fashioned gangster movie about the glory days of the Mob in Cleveland and one Danny Greene who remains in thorn in their side for several years. The cast has a lot of regulars from other mobster movies, with the noticeable exception of the lead, Ray Stevenson, who seems to have been in a lot of things I am unfamiliar with. Kill The Irishman is the story of tough guy and mob boss Danny Greene who had a knack for being around cars when they blew up and liked nothing better than beating people to death to while…
NNNNN by Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner will always be Alan Brady to me, the man who made Robert Petrie’s life so difficult on the Dick Van Dyke Show. The fact that Carl Reiner’s glory days were about fifty years before he wrote NNNNN gives hope to all of us poor schmucks who still want to be novelists one of these days. NNNNN is possibly the worst title ever given to a book, though Carl seems to think it ranks up their with M. To me it was too much like a Marx Brothers routine, you left out an N-and the most important one, too!…
Shop Class as Soulcraft
The story of a philosopher who seems a bit surprised that there are so few job openings at the Big Philosophy Companies and ends up becoming an electrician instead. After discovering that being an electrician is not really his calling, he moves on to being a motor cycle mechanic. But he never gives up his college training of being a philosopher. Matthew B Crawford fills all of his anecdotes with small asides of the great thinkers and uses as dry and technical a writing style as any college textbook. Shop class is mentioned only in passing and I don’t…
A Fistful of Vitamins
After a month or so on the UltraMind Solution diet and lifestyle plan, I am feeling much better. Of course, feeling better is one of those things that is often hard to put a finger on. I used to be really big on trying every kind of vitamin and supplement I could find. A lot of this stuff worked wonders-for the first week or two. Bee pollen, royal jelly, phosphatidylserine, CoQ-10 & N-Acetyle-somethng, B vitamins, and of course, coffee in all it’s wonderous forms. I am also a huge fan of Taurine, the stuff that give Red Bull it’s kick.…