Binging With My Girls

Binge watching TV shows is a recent phenomenon, or maybe just a new term for an old behavior.  While it is  pretty disruptive to your normal routine, binge watching is  a great immersive entertainment experience.

The term and the activity are pretty mainstream these days, with the advent of streaming services like Netflix, but binge watching may have originated back when TBS and some of the other cable originals would run marathons.  The slow evolution of binge watching popularity was probably due to the (lack of) quality of offerings and minimal control.  There were not that many people interested in devoting free weekends to The Gilligan's Island Marathon or The Gunsmoke Marathon.

Actually, there probably never was a Gunsmoke Marathon, because there were 635 episodes of Gunsmoke,  which would have been reallllly long weekend, like 26 days of non-stop watching of what was usually the same story every week. Mimsy argues that Gunsmoke "wasn't really that popular".  The show was only on for 20 years, dear...

James Arness was Sheriff Matt Dillon. Once
a week for twenty years.  With commercials.

Binge got bigger with the arrival of home videotape, placing control in the viewer's hands, then came CD's, and the breadth of the selection-- and the convenience-- exploded.  You could watch one after another of any crappy old show that caught your fancy and never connect to actual, real life--and no commercials!

We discovered binge watching --of a rudimentary sort-- during the time we lived in the Caribbean.  We paid about a zillion dollars a month for satellite TV that offered the crappiest programming imaginable (like endless novellas from Puerto Rico and island governmental meetings).  For actual entertainment we ultimately turned to Netflix.

Problem solved...not so well, it turned out, as our internet service (which likewise required an immense monthly ransom payment), worked sporadically, slowly and unpredictably.  We would watch for a few minutes, then let it buffer for a few minutes, then watch again, trying not to lose the storyline. It was mind boggling, all these wonderful state of the art  technologies smashing into each other like a NASCAR accident and ultimately working like a big pile of electronic crap.  HD big screen smart TV + satellite technology + the internet + fabulous entertainment, all  operating on infrastructure that couldn't reliably run the original pong game.  So binge watching required dedication, patience and a lot of time. 

My felonious girlfriends from Orange,..most of them, anyway

.

Back in the present tense and real world,  electronic stuff works as it should. We have since bonded with spies(Homeland),  meth cooks and junkies (Breaking Bad), cowboys, Mormons and hookers all doing their part to build the transcontinental railroad (Hell on Wheels) more cowboys and hookers (Deadwood), and probably some others I can't recall. 

I've made new video friends I would never have expected, as we've  just finished binge watching Orange is the New Black. It's an incredible show about the residents and staff of a fictional women's prison in upstate New York. Pair up great entertainment with the binge commitment and you may end up with unexpected results.   We've watched the available four seasons of Orange, getting to know everyone, night after night, bonding, as it were, and now must wait for months until the next season becomes available. 

So here I sit, in withdrawal, desperately missing my white/black/Hispanic lesbian transgender female felon TV friends as I await the release of Season V.

 Keep the faith, sisters, I will be here when you return...and I never promised that to Gilligan or the Dodge City folks.

Thank You, Harry Callahan

You might be mumbling, right about now "so you decided to come back...where were you last week..."  If you are so inclined to have a good mumble on my account, I am deeply grateful, as it indicates that you missed me, and we all like to be missed, now, don't we?

I was incapacitated last week; incapable of communicating any series of discernable thoughts, rendered mumbly myself, and at my own hand.  I had a dandy hangover and within that context was reminded of the foibles of age, why we are supposed to be wiser as we get older.  The message was powerful.

'Cause hangovers, at this point in life, are a two day process.

Goddamn, what a mess!  My sweet godchild, Alyssa, came by to visit on Friday evening.  She is lovely, glib, and entertaining, and she has been a special person in mine and Mimsy's life forever.  So, as we sat around the kitchen table, getting caught up on the wonderful things going on in her life, I had a cocktail.  We chatted away, and I had another, and...run this one out to its logical conclusion.  Now fast forward to Saturday morning.

I was crippled. 

Koda the Wonderdog, she is a great alarm clock.  Comes to the side of the bed and shoves her furry

AAACCCKKK...Muppet assault

mug into mine around the same time most mornings, sometimes with a soft "woof" to greet me.  When one's brain is marginally functional, however, this can become an alarming experience. Coming to consciousness like floating to the top of a pool, you see...something, and wonder if you've entered the Muppet World.  Then you get a breathy "woof" that is laden with the warm fragrance of tuna or some other gross shit that was in her morning dog food and things start to come back a lot faster.

  What did I do???

That's what spouses are good at: keeping track of the details of your miscreant behavior from the night before.  While the episodes for which she must do this are few and far between, Mimsy has a unique style.  She is rather chipper and happy, smiling endlessly  as she relates what was consumed and what inappropriate behavior accompanied it, her message  somewhere between "aw, it's ok, ya big lug" and "I'm going to have the best time torturing you, you miserable bastard". 

We can fast forward through Saturday, as sitting in the recliner staring at the TV and drinking bottles of water, that isn't so interesting.  It's waking up Sunday and still feeling like an inferior life form, that's the rub here.  Somewhere in the middle of Sunday afternoon, most brain function has returned, but by now the day is a write off and one is left to ponder a younger day, a time when you could go out and raise all hell and bounce out of bed at the crack of dawn and have a full productive day and share the memory of the previous night's bacchanal with nothing holding you back.

Them days is gone, pal.  Now it's Dirty Harry, perched on your shoulder, endlessly reminding you...

Youngblood Hawke is a Band?

Maybe you are familiar with Herman Wouk, the author.  Maybe you think you aren't, but you are, a little bit.  Herman Wouk has written many, many things in his career. 

The Caine Mutiny.

Bogart and Fred MacMurray.  Huh?

Winds of  War.

War and Remembrance.

Youngblood Hawke.

Herman Wouk wrote those, and more.   There's more, and more to the ones listed above.  The Caine Mutiny and Youngblood Hawke were very successful movies.  Winds of War and War and Remembrance were mega blockbuster TV miniseries.

There's another book Wouk published in 2015.  It is titled Sailor and Fiddler : Reflection of a 100-Year Old Author.

Herman Wouk, born 1915, is still writing.  Amazing.  Sailor and Fiddler is a breezy autobiography.  If you've followed his books a bit, you may find it entertaining.  If you haven't, it's probably not going to get you too excited.  The fact that Wouk pumped out a pretty good book at 100 years of age, that is simply remarkable. 

He tells of meetings and conversations with characters who were huge celebrities in their day, and occasionally discloses that he's a little fuzzy on the details, dismissing the gaffe in one instance with the comment "...forgive me, the conversation took place 62 years ago..." 

The reason that I've shared this bit of mildly entertaining information with you today is words.   Herman Wouk is arguably the greatest American novelist ever.   Herman Wouk knows lotsa words.  Lotta lotta words.  I know lotsa words.  Herman knows more. In the first 2/3 of the book, I have jotted down 21 words that he dropped in here and  there that I had to go look up.  Some were vaguely familiar, most could be inferred from context ( you know how we sort of go with it by assuming from the surrounding thought that we know the word and maybe yes and maybe no but it's too much effort to look it up so we plow on through). 

Here they are.  There are  21 of them.  How many did you know before today?

Colliery                                                     a coal mining facility

Precis                                                        a summary of a speech or text

Piquant                                                     spicy, tangy (this one I knew, sort of)

Freebooter                                                pirate (yar! I love saying yar!)

Cormorant (adj.)                                      not the bird, as adj it means greedy

Dactyl                                                      not terra, it is an accented syllable followed by two

                                                                 unaccented, eg "flattery"

Persiflage                                                 good natured banter

Badinage                                                  the same as persiflage.  Howbowdah?

Ephemera                                                something short lived, like your enjoyment of this

Pastiche                                                   this is cool : a dramatic opening in music or literature

                                                                that mimics other works

Evanesce                                                 disappear like vapor.  whoosh!

Anodyne                                                 a pain reliever

Encomium                                                a tribute or testimonial

Limn                                                        to describe or portray

Cerberus                                                  Best One!!! this is the multi-headed monster dog that

                                                                 guards the gates of hell -- to prevent escape!!!

Vagary                                                    unexpected change

Jejeune                                                    Frasier always used this one.  It's naïve or simplistic

Litvak                                                      a Lithuanian Jew

Adduce                                                   cite as evidence

Insouciance                                             indifference

Jocose                                                     playful, humorous

So, how many did you know?

What Happens in Vegas...

…is worth every penny, as pure entertainment.

 It’s been a couple three years since we last visited Disneyland for Grown Ups, and it is still the most entertaining place on earth.  There's a grand variety of professional entertainment (Willie Nelson, sold out, Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, sold out, some guy named Keith Sweat, pass, Keith Sweat? from

The giant sentinel guarding the entrance.

the original Perspirations? Donnie and Marie, um, oh, they’re off right now, that’s ok I mean darn it!), but the tourists who come to LV,  they are the real entertainment.

We begin with the Las Vegas Debutante Parade.  While in LV, Mimsy and I maintain our ‘old people from the Midwest’ schedule, that is, we are heading out on Midwest morning time when many of the previous evening’s revelers are attempting to return to base.  This trip, that included a gaggle of highly inebriated debutantes who found themselves stranded (OMG!) in the middle of the night (OMG!) outside our 22^nd floor door.  There was a highly emotional and generally senseless conversation that reached an emotional and clueless crescendo --like an old ScoobyDoo cartoon adventure--when the leader of the pack (a.k.a. the “quaggle” or “queen of the gaggle”) cried out in exasperation “GIRLS--SOMETHING’S WRONG!!!   I’ve searched this whole floor… EVERY F&%kIN’ ROOM STARTS WITH  22!!!

 THERE IS NO 2319!!!”   

Later that morning, as we headed out, we were treated to the Miss Las Vegas Runway Walk. This is where pairs of young women, dressed to the nines and in unequal states of inebriation, test their homing instincts. The more highly impaired of the two is linked to a designated walker, the one who is less smashed.  Trudging along zombie-like, the impaired ones cling to their handlers, their survival instinct in full deployment, telling them  that should they let go they have no hope of finding nor passing out in a bed.

We also witnessed a new phenomenon: the late night indoor drunk driver.  This antique degenerate came flying around the corner of the main floor hallway on his Rascal  pedal to the metal, barely conscious and wholly unconcerned and unaware of pedestrians.   We pressed against the wall as he flew by, oblivious, careening toward parts unknown. We hoped he would not encounter a gaggle of zombie girls.  Oh, the humanity…

I was certain the High Roller would be

a failure.  It has instead become one of

the best know Vegas attractions. 

This was the week leading up to Super Bowl (or “The Big Game” if you are not a licensed user of NFL properties), so there was an influx of young men arriving throughout the day on Friday.  This group is a walking social evolution study.  They are partial towards wearing backwards baseball caps, making them look like big hairy ten year olds, strolling along with cans of beer, held out in front of them, like the morning coffee brigade does with their Starbucks, except this is all hours, morning, noon, and night, everywhere they travel.  They also wear sunglasses at night and inside to reinforce their display of machismo and tend to be donned in pastel polo shirts, mismatched shorts and rubber Nike shower sandals.  It’s “a look”.  They are generally genial as they amble about in small pods. When they gamble at a slot machine, there is a predetermined formation : one gambles, two stand behind the gambler to watch and grunt while swigging their beer, and the fourth member, who displays aggressive verbal traits,  waves his beer in the air and stomps around screaming encouragement like “HIT THAT MOTHERF&%KER,  MAN”  and “F&%k YEAH,BITCH” and “YEAAAAAHHHHH, BABY” and, of course, “WHOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”.  This all takes place while he is being ignored by the rest of the pod, raising the question of whether he is a pod member or just a young vagrant in search of a pod.  Further study will be required.

Older folks are fun, too.   One senior couple displayed their “assume the position” slot mode.  The gentleman admonished his spouse (yes, ladies, he was being an asshole) “THE SYSTEM! STICK TO THE SYSTEM!  LEFT HAND ONLY!” as he took up his position standing behind her, slightly askew to her right, supervising as she awkwardly fed the ticket into the machine-- left handed—pausing at the choreographed moment  to allow him to light his lucky cigarette (do they still make Lucky Strike?).Then and only  then did the woman begin to  push the wager buttons- left handed only- as he supervised and smoked. 

They got crushed.  Maybe they need a new system.  Maybe she needs a new partner.

How I remember my room

number since it's not on the

key card.  Take a picture. I

don't really need to know

anything anymore if I have

my phone. 

Mimsy killed it at the slots, winning about 2:1 what I lost.  That’s our system.  I just shut up and try not to do too much damage.  She wins, I should stay on the sidelines reading the “Welcome to Exciting Las Vegas” ad magazines.

We migrate from one casino to the next.  At one point, we had to pause for Mimsy to rest a moment, and we happened to be at Casino Royale. We plopped down at one of those enormous old Wheel of Fortune games, the kind where the players sit around the perimeter of the wheel that must be 20 feet in diameter.  In a couple of minutes, I won a spin of the big wheel as Video Vanna clapped and offered encouragement.  

BAM—I won $100!  Nice, huh?

Not more than a two minutes later, Mimsy hit a spin of the big wheel and BAM BAM--won $200.

 You got yer winners and you got yer losers, see?  Stick ta da system.

Other sightings:

·       the security guard in one of the casinos on our early rounds radioing to his supervisor “we’ve got a sleeper-we HAVE a sleeper”, as he prepared to roust a comatose drunk left over from last night

·       the guy trying to celebrate a straight flush big win at Mirage,  with words of encouragement from his pal “maybe you can buy back the guitar now”

·       a hooker throwing a fit when her young client demanded she return his leather jacket as she departed MGM, 8:30 a.m.

·       two old queens throwing a hissy fit at the airport, 5:00 p.m. Hilarious.

·       the unfortunate maintenance crew at Linq Promenade assigned to vomit patrol, and finally

·       a woman at McCarren Airport security loudly protesting “PROFILING!!!” and nobody-neither TSA nor travelers- giving a shit.

I love Las Vegas.

Hello, Handsome...

I have a really good job.  One of the things that qualifies it as such is that I travel a bit for work and go to extremely nice places. One of those places, where I was last week, is the company's facility in Riviera Beach, Florida. 

Riviera Beach itself isn't particularly wonderful (more about that another time), but when I'm working there I stay in West Palm Beach.  That is pretty much wonderful.  More about that another time as well.

Getting there means flying into either West Palm Beach airport or Ft. Lauderdale.  West Palm Beach airport is so convenient as to be ridiculous.  It's Midway convenient, times two.  It's also clean, bright, loaded with ancient travelers, stuff like that, but mostly it is  incredibly convenient.  The other side of the coin is that flights into West Palm Beach cost more, and the primary service provider for direct flights is American, and that would require my hiking it up to O'Hare, which I prefer to avoid.  That's a long winded way of saying I like flying from Midway, and that means going to Ft Lauderdale aiport, an hour south of Riviera Beach.  That requires, of course, an hour drive back to Ft Lauderdale airport when it's time to return home.

That's where I found myself Friday morning, southbound  on I-95, headed for the airport in Ft Lauderdale, and wondering if there was ever an actual Fort Lauderdale.  The rental car had to be fueled, so I got off the expressway near the airport, at the same exit I'd done before, to get gas and find a bathroom.  Sunrise Boulevard.  Yeah, that's where I got off last time, Sunrise Boulevard, and that worked out just fine.  Food, gas and a shortcut to the airport access road.

I should interject here that I have always had a knack for finding the shittiest neighborhoods, wherever I travel.  Places where I stand out as unique.  Unusual.  Not local.  You get the idea.  So it was on Friday morning as I realized that Sunrise Boulevard was not where I had been before and Sunrise Boulevard was not where I would be instantly comfortable making new friends on Friday morning. 

Back in the day ("the day" in this case being the 1830's) it was customary for the military to name a fort after the commander who settled it.  Luckily for the folks around here, the first fort was established by Major William Lauderdale, who was sent here to drive off the last warring Seminoles.  I say they are lucky because imagine if the first fort had been established by, say, Captain Alvin Turdflinger.  Would people be getting excited to travel to visit the beaches of Ft Turdflinger, Florida? I think not.

Our man Lauderdale (we are back in the day again) had contracted some respiratory problems that were exacerbated by chasing natives off their property and died six months later in Baton Rouge.  So much for the health enhancing effects of working in South Florida.

Statue of Maj. Wm. Lauderdale.

Not the darling of the Seminole nation.

Back in the current day, as I veered off the expressway onto Sunrise Boulevard, there was a sign directing me to a Shell station a mile or so along.  Excellent,  proceed.  I pulled in there and was promptly approached by a local entrepreneur, a woman whose name I didn't catch, and from whom I would gladly catch nothing else.

"Well helloooo handsome...aren't you Johnny that I met at CVS last night (turning entrepreneurially to assure that I was duly impressed by what passes for coquettish southern belle behavior as displayed by gas station hookers at ten o'clock on a Friday morning)...I sure do hope so 'cause I will be so disappointed..."

No.  I ain't Johnny, and I gotta go. 

So, without gas and without having found a bathroom (shudder...it was probably Belle's "office") I jump back in the car and head back toward the expressway.  REALLY need a bathroom by this point. AHA!  McDonald's ahead!  Clean bathrooms--and no hookers!  Awesome!

I pull in and jump out of the car and enter and find, how shall I say this, hmm, it is as if I am Major Lauderdale, and this McDonald's is for the exclusive use of the local Seminole tribe.  As I enter, all the Seminoles stop what they're doing, saying, ordering, eating, etc. and gaze upon the interloper.  That would be me.  Steve Interloper, how you doin'.

I spot the bathrooms, and that is much more urgent at this point than introducing myself to the locals.  I brush past an apparent local and into the men's room where there's an employee tidying up.  I grunt a greeting and close the door, at which point the other patron has followed me in (into the bathroom, not the stall) and there's suddenly this dual howl of laughter and chagrin, as the fellow following apparently had the same requirement and the employee found it highly amusing that I'd captured "the fort", and let loose with one of those screeching laughs while the other guy let go a lament and I ...well, you know.

There was no one in the rest room there when I exited.  There was what appeared to yet another entrepreneur in the parking lot (at McDonalds--at ten in the morning--seriously?).  I filled the gas tank at another station on the other side of the expressway, which was just as crappy, by the way, but far less entrepreneurial, and fled to the relatively mundane surroundings of Ft. Lauderdale airport, where the young woman who checked in my rental car asked "What could we have done to make your experience EXCELLENT?"

Nothing, thank you.

I'm fine just the way it was. 

Exploring Up in the Attic

Hello?

This is a little bit odd, this experience of dusting off the old blog site.  The last new posts to this site were in 2009, which is a long time ago.  Dear friend Frieda Rome suggested again that I do some word smithing, so I'm giving it a go. 

This isn't the most recent of my blog locations.  Most recent would be BVI Steve, the chronicles of the adventures of our abruptly terminated  relocation to the British Virgin Islands.  The earliest of those BVI missives is lost, the majority of them exist in email files that are backed up on one of the computers laying around here. Those are different stories for a different time.  Once statutes run out, I'll figure out how to put those up for anyone who's interested.

Clark Griswold, in the attic.  You loved that part, too, didn't you?

This site, Never A Dull Moment,  was the location of a long series of essays about topics that are related only by the fact that they interested me at some point and sparked some degree of research.  Kind of like sparkly, shiny things that attracted me for a while (insert here  whatever simile you feel applies).  I've gone back and read some of the old posts and I think they're pretty entertaining. Feel free to poke around.

Once we get some momentum established, I hope that this becomes a community experience, that is, I pretty please ask for interaction and feedback.  You are free to say anything you want, please just don't be an asshole, or if you must be, do it with some measure of intelligent and defensible thought.  So, on we go.

Let's don't start off here with politics.  That just makes people angry; usually, people about whom we care, but who have strong feelings that we don't share.

Kind of like Mimsy and me and Jack Daniel's.  She just doesn't share that special feeling that I have about Jack...and Gentleman Jack? Puh-leeze and OMG, let's don't go there, girlfriend.  Mimsy does, however, look kindly on the relationship and regularly contributes toward keeping the relationship healthy. That's what we're seeking here:  That you should all feel that warm glow inside after you've stopped by here.

The way you feel after you've stopped at the bakery.

Whiskey and fresh bakery, all in the first posting.  What's not to love?