{"id":14695,"date":"2014-05-15T12:59:14","date_gmt":"2014-05-15T19:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14695"},"modified":"2014-05-15T13:42:48","modified_gmt":"2014-05-15T20:42:48","slug":"thursday-bag-o-dorian-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14695","title":{"rendered":"Thursday Bag o’ Dorian Gray"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1340412_12592581-bagtote16_l\"The lingering-at-the-nest\u00a0hummingbird chick I was worried about? It flew off Monday. The guy who does our yard work every month told me they’ll continue to come back to the nest for a while after they learn to fly. It flew off for good when he\u00a0fired up his\u00a0leaf blower, heading for the big mesquite tree between our house and the highway … clearly it had flown before and knew where it was going. Good luck, new hummingbirds. I’ll keep the feeders topped off\u00a0for you.<\/p>\n

Donna’s away, visiting our goddaughter Natasha and god-grandaughter (grand-goddaughter?) Giorgi in San Jose. I dropped her off at the airport Wednesday afternoon; I’ll pick her up when she flies home next Wednesday. So it’s me and the dogs and the cat, roughing it for a week. The dogs and I are a little mopey. I can take the dogs’ minds off Donna by giving them baths today and taking them to the dog park and feed store Friday. As for myself, hosting Saturday’s book club, then\u00a0going riding on Sunday’s bicycle hash will help. After the weekend, though, we’ll all return to feeling sorry for ourselves. The cat? Who knows what it thinks, or if it has emotions at all?<\/p>\n

I’m trying to let news of political ratfuckery (a technical term with a defined meaning<\/a>) wash over me, since it always happens and there’s nothing I can do about it. I really resent it, though, when the GOP\u00a0makes me feel sorry for Hillary Clinton, a corporatist establishment candidate even more corporatist and establishment than Barack Obama (at least Obama didn’t vote to invade Iraq). What ratfuckery, you ask? Try this:<\/p>\n

\"10270605_10152403785597346_5300445021689670010_n\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So that happened\u00a0(I took the screen grab myself yesterday afternoon). Probably what inspired Drudge to try his hand at photoshopping was\u00a0Karl Rove questioning whether\u00a0Hillary Clinton is fit for office, then implying\u00a0she suffered a traumatic brain injury after her fall last year. I really really do not want my next presidential choice\u00a0to be Hillary Clinton, but now I feel I have to defend her by voting for her. God damn you Karl Rove!<\/p>\n

I’d rather vote for Gabby Giffords, who really did suffer\u00a0a traumatic brain injury and who has been entirely up front about it, even if it means her husband, Mark Kelly, would be the shadow president. Shit, I like him too. Gabby & Mark for president!<\/p>\n

Gah, enough. Let’s talk television. When I really like a show I set up the DVR to record\u00a0the entire series. One, to watch shows\u00a0when I want to watch them. Two, to be able\u00a0to fast-forward through commercials. Three, to\u00a0cancel recording them\u00a0when I realize they’ve\u00a0been available to me all along\u00a0on\u00a0HBO on Demand\u00a0or\u00a0streaming TV.<\/p>\n

The shows I’m DVR’ing these days are FX’s The Americans<\/em> and Fargo<\/em>, and HBO’s Game of Thrones<\/em>. To a lesser degree I’m taping Fox’s Cosmos<\/em> (I’ll explain what I mean by “a lesser degree” in a minute).\u00a0Both FX shows are on late at night; by taping them I can watch them at a reasonable time the following\u00a0evening (and zip through the commercials, which run often and hard on FX). HBO’s GOT<\/em>, OTOH (see what I did there?), comes on too damn early Sunday night, so I tape it to watch later that same evening.<\/p>\n

Since Fox’s Cosmos<\/em> comes on Sunday night while I’m still watching GOT<\/em>\u00a0on tape, I tape\u00a0it as well and\u00a0watch it after GOT<\/em>.\u00a0I’m losing interest in Cosmos<\/em>, though. I DVR it because I support Neil deGrasse Tyson’s\u00a0efforts to reach that vast\u00a0know-nothing audience that otherwise sees\u00a0only what Fox News shows\u00a0it. I’m familiar with\u00a0most of the concepts Tyson\u00a0covers, and\u00a0put off by the childish animated segments Cosmos<\/em> uses as filler. I’m about to take it\u00a0off my DVR schedule. I had started taping another Sunday night show, HBO’s Silicon Valley<\/em>, but it didn’t hold my interest. It’s available through HBO on Demand, so I can always come back to it later.<\/p>\n

As for streaming TV (we subscribe to Amazon Prime and Netflix), our favorites are 1) the Swedish version of Wallander<\/em>, 2) the BBC version of same, 3) the American version of House of Cards<\/em>, 4) BBC’s Doc Martin<\/em>. We’re slowly working our way through Mad Men<\/em>, Doctor Who<\/em>, and a few other series everyone but us has seen, so no spoilers please.<\/p>\n

I gave up on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a few months ago. Not because they’re not consistently funny, but because they’re\u00a0merely that\u00a0—\u00a0funny\u00a0—\u00a0when they could be encouraging citizen activism. John Oliver’s new show, Last Week Tonight<\/em>, is likewise funny\u00a0— Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with tits and dicks — but ultimately if people just watch these shows for the laughs and keep voting for\u00a0the same corrupt\u00a0politicians who sell us out to big money, what\u00a0purpose do these shows serve, other than to keep us from rising up in open rebellion? Gee, I wish George Carlin were still around.<\/p>\n

I’ll say it again: Giffords and Kelly 2016! Say it with me, people! Hey, maybe we can get something going here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I really really do not want my next presidential choice to be Hillary Clinton, but now I feel I have to defend her by voting for her. God damn you Karl Rove!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,16,8,30,414],"tags":[207,186,1135,1539],"class_list":["post-14695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics","category-reviews","category-tv","tag-gabby-giffords","tag-karl-rove","tag-streaming-tv","tag-tv-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14695"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14708,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695\/revisions\/14708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}