woodlands park yesterday

New build mansion in Providence Road

what think ye of monk

I have been watching a little bit of Monk lately. The show was on air between 2002-2009 and I never watched it then (as I recall) but I have been watching it slowly usually over breakfast and getting quite a bit out of it. I'm in the second season at the moment. Adrian Monk and his nurse/assistant (she can be both), Sharona. Tony Shalhoub and Bitty Schramm have a really good chemistry and a lot of funny lines. I guess there is a sense in which the show is parodying people 'on the spectrum' etc, though whether that is so much the case that you couldn't make it today, I'm not sure - after all, Monk's neuroses (if you want to call them that, maybe I shouldn't, though some of them I'm pretty sure are nothing more than neuroses) are also what make him a brilliant detective. 

It's also full of great guests, like Sarah Silverman as an obsessed fan and Amy Sedaris who plays Sharona's sister. There is one genuinely funny exchange between them which I am sure is an improvisation - it has AS's improv stamp all over it. If not, it's a good scriptwriter response to the potential of AS. 

The early 21st century was an interesting time. People talk about looking things up on the internet. They even discuss having cell phones, etc (I mean, I am pretty sure I first got a mobile phone in 1996 or 7, so they weren't a novelty anymore). Computers aren't ubiquitous exactly, but they exist, obviously. In one episode I watched someone used a computerised navigational system that was run off a CD-rom, rather than a satellite, which meant a computer nerd could hack it. I guess what I'm looking at here is a twenty-year-old program, and it really doesn't feel that long ago. 

is it a bear

Duolingo drives me mad, for instance when it tells me that varovainen is a 'weak word' for me. It's not. I know it means 'careful'. I am so freakin' sick of the above and 'ole varoveinen, tee on kylma' etc etc. 

emily symons speaks out! thirty four years ago!

As is so often the case with these interviews, I have precisely no memory of meeting Emily Symons, though you'd think I would because I thought Marilyn was a great character on Home and Away. This so-called interview was very early in Symons' career - she had another decade on H&A ahead of her, then a long stretch in the UK on Emmerdale, and then back to Australia and to H&A. That's a career! 

 

Most impressive easter egg in this piece I think is that I misspelled Henri Szeps' name as Henry early on, then misspelled dyed as died later, as a kind of, you know (trails off...)

flook may 1954

 

Thank you to Paul Hudson for supplying the strip for 24 May from (I assume) the London Daily Mail, which was missing from the North American run of Flook: 

(Note the strip in the UK was still called Rufus!). 

Brooklyn! I mean... what is going on