Virus Isolation Report: TV Edition (part 1)

I had the brilliant idea of trying to figure out all the television I’d watched during this first year of the pandemic and then figure out how many hours that was and maybe write a short paragraph on each one.  I vastly underesimated the amount of effort (and content) this would be.  I’ve decided to break it into two halves, and it still ends up being two posts which are significantly longer than most of the ones I do here.  And, the really scary part is: this isn’t even all of it.  In order to put some kind of cap on it, I’ve decided to include only episodic shows where I watched one or more entire seasons (or series, for the British shows) during the pandemic.  This automatically eliminates:

• Shows that I started before the pandemic but completed during it, including a few where there was only a single episode I watched prior to the lockdown.¹
• Shows that I started during the pandemic but I haven’t finished watching them yet, including a few where I have only one more episode to go.²
• Shows that don’t slot neatly into seasons, such The Daily Show or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
• Movies.  I’ve watched a lot of movies this year as well.
• Random YouTube videos, most of which don’t really fit the guideline of “episodic.” (On the other hand, where a series of YouTube vidoes did seem to fit that criterion, I threw ’em in.)
• Critical Role.  Divided into campaigns rather than seasons, a CR campaign is years long, so it naturally can’t be contained in something like this.  Still, that’s anywhere from 3 – 5 hours a week for the majority of the pandemic, so it accounts for a healthy chunk of viewing time.

And, still, this is a lot of hours ... I won’t come up with a grand total until next week, but I can already announce that it’s way more than I probably ought to be admitting to.  But there’s some great stuff in here—we live in a golden age of television, I think, after a lot of years (decades, really) of complete crap.  And also a bit of not-so-great stuff: hey, it was the pandemic.  There was a lot of time to fill.

I’ve also provided a simple rating system, from one to five stars.  But I have to warn you: this group skews mostly toward the upper end of that scale.  There are two big reasons for that:

• I’m not a harsh critic.  As long as I’m entertained, I’ll throw a show at least a 3, which for me means “a perfectly lovely way to kill a few hours.”
• This is a list of TV shows that I finished watching; if something was really bad, I never bothered to finish it.  There are literally zero 1-star reviews here (which I would characterize as “unwatchable”) and not that many 2-star reviews.  A 2 means either I only suffered through it because I felt I had some investment I needed to pay off, or maybe that it started out well but took an unexpected turn for the worse.

I should also warn you that, even before the pandemic, I was already starting a trend towards eschewing any show that felt too “real”; in the list below, you’ll find barely anything at all that doesn’t contain some sort of element of fantasy or sci-fi or horror, and absolutely no reality TV (nope, I didn’t watch Tiger King along with the rest of you).  But especially in the midst of a year-long virus isolation experiment, “reality” didn’t hold much appeal.  I need my entertainment to take me pretty far away at this point.

I’ve also included which season(s) I watched, where you can find it if you’re so inclined, and, as I mentioned, a brief paragraph on it.  These are almost entirely spoiler-free; I’m less interested in a synopsis than in extolling actors I like, talking about formats that worked well (or didn’t), or maybe touching on the cultural significance.  For the most part, I’m assuming you either already know the basic premise, or can look it up yourself.

Well, that’s more than enough intro.  Here’s the first half.

Inside the Episodes S1 [behind-the-scenes for The Witcher S1] (Amazon Prime, ~1 hour) ★★★

See my review of The Witcher next week.  This is almost required viewing, just so you can figure out what the fuck is going on.  It’s not super in-depth though.

Dicktown S1 rewatch (Hulu, ~2 hours) ★★★★

I love Judge John Hodgman, and I loved Going Deep with David Rees.  So why would I not want to watch an animated series where the two of them play thinly disguised versions of themselves who are teen detectives, except grown up, except still working for teenagers, in their hometown of Richardsville, North Carolina (hence the series name).  With some amazing voice acting (not just Hodgman and Rees, but Jean Grae, Kristen Schaal, Janet Varney, Paul F. Tompkins, etc etc), good animation, and interesting and funny plots, this little show turned out to be a real gem.  After watching it in its original form embedded in Cake (see below), my middle child and I watched it again separately.  Lots of fun.

Zomboat! S1 (Hulu, ~3 hours) ★★★★

Horror comedy is tricky to get right.  Too far in the one direction and you get a non-funny gory mess; too far in the other direction, and you get a goofy jumble that’s not even remotely scary.  There are a few movies that do a good job with it, but doing it in episodic form is even tougher.  Zomboat!, an ITV show starring Crazyhead’s Cara Theobold, hits all the right notes, and is a worthy successor to movies like Shaun of the Dead.

Two Weeks to Live S1 (HBO, ~3 hours) ★★★★

If you want to see a kick-ass battle scene between Game of Thrones’s Ayra Stark and Gotham’s Alfred Pennyworth, this is your show.  With a premise that might have easily devolved into goofiness, this show turns into something that is simultaneously funny, heartwarming, and action-packed.  Glad I stumbled on it.

Red Dwarf S5 re-rewatch (DVD, ~3 hours) ★★★★

As my #5 favorite Britcom, Red Dwarf is one of those shows I’ve watched again and again.  When my eldest was a teen, I sat down and went through the DVD box set with them, and now my middle child has reached the same age, and we’re slowly (ever so slowly) working our way through the set again.  As many times as I’ve seen it, it never gets old.  Like Monty Python, the Young Ones, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and Blackadder, it only grows better with age.

Castlevania S3 (Netflix, ~3½ hours) ★★★

Once upon a time, comics were for everyone, then, for a long time, they were just for kids.  Gradually, reactionary comics for adults started sneaking in, until eventually they took over.  A very similar situation exists for anime: in the old days, we had Akira and Vampire Hunter D; then it was all Pokémon and Voltron and Dragon Ball Z, with the occasional stand-out like Ninja Scroll.  But lately, anime has been getting more and more adult.  Castlevania is sort of the pinnacle of that: not only does it feature some pretty serious UK voice acting from the likes of Richard Armitage (of Spooks), Jaime Murray (of Hustle, Dexter, Warehouse 13, et al), Graham McTavish (of Preacher), and Bill Nighy (of Love Actually, two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, three Underworld movies, and about a million other things), it has explicit sex and ultraviolence up the wazoo.  It’s fairly fun, but not for the faint of heart.

Absurd! Planet S1 (Netflix, ~4 hours) ★★

I never would have made it through to the end of this bit of silliness if my youngest weren’t totally enamored with it.  As much as I love nature shows, this show has some serious tonal issues: it wants to be goofy enough to intrigue small kids, but for some reason it’s peppered with adult humor.  As a result, the adult watching vacillates between groaning and uncomfortable silence.  I did learn a few things, so I won’t call it a complete waste, but certainly not my favorite.

Woke S1 (Hulu, ~4 hours) ★★★

I almost gave this show a pass, as the subject matter was all too real this past year.  But I loved Lamorne Morris in New Girl, so I gave it a shot.  It’s a good show.  I’m glad I watched it.  But be forewarned: even with all the magic realism, light entertainment it ain’t.

Camp Cretaceous S1 (Netflix, ~4 hours) ★★★

This was a perfectly fine thing to watch with my kids.  Set in the same time period as the events of Jurassic World, this tells the story of 6 kids who get the opportunity to attend a special summer camp on Isla Nublar for various reasons—one wins a contest, one is the son of a wealthy donor to the park, one is the daughter of a major vendor, and so forth.  It’s a diverse group of kids in all senses, including their personalities, so it makes for an interesting storyline.  And, being animated, they can do quite a lot of dramatic dinosaur action.  You’ll spend a little bit of time yelling at the screen for them to stop doing dumb things, but overall it’s not bad.

The Hollow S2 (Netflix, ~4 hours) ★★★★

The first season of this show was fantastic: surreal, intriguing, impossible, and yet it all came together and made perfect sense in the end.  I don’t think this second season succeeds quite as well, but it’s close.  I think it’s really hard to do a follow-up for a movie or series that has a big reveal at the end, because, once you know the big reveal, there’s no mystery left.  But this does about as well as it could.  (Although I couldn’t help but feel like they rewrote some character history for convenience.)

Truth Seekers S1 (Amazon Prime, ~4 hours) ★★★★

One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that, no matter how dumb something looks, if Nick Frost is significantly involved in it, it’s going to be awesome.  Truth Seekers is no exception.  And, hey: we get to also throw in Susan Wokoma (from Crazyhead), Julian Barratt (from The Mighty Boosh), and Malcolm McDowell (from ... well, everything), plus of course Simon Pegg shows up every now and again.  The premise is completely stupid, and yet it works amazingly well, shows surprising depth, and ends up with a plot that’s complex in all the best ways.  Definitely check it out.

Inside the Boys S1 [behind-the-scenes for The Boys S2] (Amazon Prime, ~4½ hours) ★★★★

Assuming you liked The Boys (and that’s a big assumption; see my review for that below), you’ll probably dig this aftershow in the style of Talking Dead.  I’ve tried to watch a few of these, but few can hold up to Chris Hardwick.  However, Aisha Tyler is one of the few.  She’s articulate, trenchant, and exactly as irreverant as you need to be to discuss a show that gets off on gross-outs and blatant sexual references (and isn’t afraid to mix the two).  And the guests (most of whom are cast members or crew of the show) offer great insights.

History of Horror S2 (AMC+, ~4½ hours) ★★★

Mainly I watch this to see if there are any good horror movies that I’ve somehow missed, and often I find one or two in each episode.  I don’t know that I enjoyed this season as much as the first, but it’s perfectly fine for what it is.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine S7 (Hulu, ~4½ hours) ★★★★

This is another of those brainless sitcoms that I thought I was watching just to kill time and ended up getting completely hooked on.  While Andy Samberg should be the big draw, Terry Crews, Stephanie Beatriz, Chelsea Peretti, and Andre Braugher are just as good, if not better.  S7 continues the joyous run, albeit without Peretti, and on a new network.  B99 is one of those few shows that got cancelled and yet is still on the air, proving just how good it is.  So far the quality hasn’t dipped; we’ll see if they can keep it up.

Sherlock S4 (Netflix, ~4½ hours) ★★★★

I’ve loved this modern take on Sherlock Holmes, not only for Benedict Cumberbatch’s nigh-autistic take on Sherlock, but possibly even more so for Martin Freeman’s excellent Dr. Watson.  I didn’t love this last season as much as the previous ones, but that still leaves it ahead of a lot of other options out there.  Highly intelligent, fast-moving, keeps you guessing.  Not much else you can ask for in a mystery series.

Space Force S1 (Netflix, ~5 hours) ★★★★

Yet another show that I was convinced would be dumb beyond belief, but I gave it a chance because of the stellar cast and ended up being pleasantly surprised.  Steve Carell is always dependable, of course, though he can stray into embarassment humor territory (as in The Office).  Malkovich, on the other hand, one doesn’t think of as a comedic genius, but he’s geniuinely funny here, and the relationship between Carell’s stiff military man and Malkovich’s disdainful scientist intellectual is the primary driving dynamic.  Ben Schwartz does what Ben Schwartz does, playing the oily PR guy, Jimmy O. Yang turns in a great turn as a slightly nerdier scientist, and Lisa Kudrow turns up every now and again to do that quirky, unexpected performance thing that she does so well.  The premise is, sadly, not nearly as outlandish as it ought to be, but the timeliness enhances it; not sure it’ll be this funny if you wait too long to catch it.

Schitt’s Creek S6 (Netflix, ~5 hours) ★★★★

After I discovered Monty Python but before I discovered Kids in the Hall, I stumbled onto SCTV.  It was definitely one of my formative comedy experiences, so I’m always attracted to projects that feature two or more SCTV alumni.  That was my primary reason for originally checking out Schitt’s Creek (and Chris Elliott was just a bonus), but Dan Levy and Emily Hampshire turned out to be the real finds here.  Somehow this show manages to walk a fine line between throwing the characters into embarrassing situations so we can laugh at their mishaps (which I geneerally find to be cringeworthy instead of funny) and just trading on the acerbic wit and cluelessness of these tragically fish-out-of-water characters.  Layer onto that a solid and genuinely deep emotional core, and it’s hard not to love this show.  S6 was its finale, and I think they wrapped it up perfectly.

McMillion$ S1 (HBO, ~6 hours) ★★★

I don’t do documentaries.  But this one was so intriguing to me—that the McDonald’s Monopoly game, which I had grown up with like millions of other Americans, had been fundamentally rigged for decades without anyone (including the McDonald’s corporate folks!) knowing, and that the story never received much national attention because it broke right before 9/11.  That such a thing was even possible was fascinating to me, but I also wondered how the hell it could require 6 hours to tell that story.  Well, I’m still not sure all the hours were required, but they were at least entertaining, and it provided a great cross-section of the people involved, some of whom were shady as hell, some of whom were just dumb and clueless, and many of whom were somewhere in between.  Especially if you dig real-life drama, this is a particularly good one of those.

Ghosts S1 – S2 (HBO, ~6 hours) ★★★★

If you know of this group of British comedians, it’s probably from Horrible Histories, and you’re likely a homeschooling family like us (or perhaps you’re just British).  The Horrible Histories books and later the series are excellent for homeschool families, because they teach a great deal of history, and do it from a perspective that really engages young kids (primarily by grossing them out, which they seem to enjoy immensely).  The troupe of actors assembled for the show by the CBBC (which is basically the British version of PBS Kids) got along so well that they started doing other projects together, and Ghosts is the latest.  The ghosts in question live in a fine old British manor house, and the group thoughtfully includes at least one character from every historical period, all the way back to caveman Robin.  Each has an entertaining death story, most of which come out over the course of the first two series, but what anchors it and really sells it are the two non-ghost characters, a couple who inherit the mansion and at first believe it’s a dream come true, only to find out that it’s a bit of a crumbling mess, and having a bunch of ghosts always underfoot can be somewhat annoying.  It’s a great show, in classic Britcom style, but also really unique, and the cast gets to reuse a lot of their makeup and costumes from Horrible Histories, which is nice.

Broadchurch S1 (Netflix, ~6 hours) ★★★★

While I’m not a huge fan of realistic TV, I’ve always had a soft spot for police procedurals.  I watch a lot fewer of them these days (and even fewer after the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of how a lot of these shows are contributing to the problem by idolizing the police and even glorifying police violence), but I still check them out occasionally, and, if you’re gonna do police procedurals, the Brits do them best.  I originally heard of Broadchurch because of its magnificent score, which is some amazing ambient work by Ólafur Arnalds.³  But the always amazing David Tennant (see also Good Omens and S1 of Jessica Jones) was also a draw, and, what with the pandemic on, I figured, what the hell.  S1 is pretty magnificent, with Tennant’s stereotypical tortured detective turning out to be a bit less stereotypical than you thought going in.  I also loved David Bradley’s performance, but then after Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and The Strain, that wasn’t all that surprising.  The story has a heartbreaking component to it, which can make it difficult to watch, and it bogs down in S2 a bit, I thought,⁴ but S1 is nearly perfect, and provides a perfectly reasonable stopping point if you don’t wish to continue.  (In fact, I honestly wondered what the hell S2 could even be about after the S1 conclusion, but think of it like an episode of Law & Order: S1 is the law part, and S2 is the order part.  Although there’s apparently an S3, so who knows what that will be about.)

Night on Earth S1 (Netflix, ~6 hours) ★★★★

As I said, I don’t care for documentaries ... except for nature shows.  Anything involving animals is a no-brainer for me, and the kids will usually watch with me, allowing me the excuse that I’m engaging in homeschooling.  This new Netflix series has some amazing wildlife footage, and a valuable message about how humans are impacting the millions of other species on the planet.  Excellent show.

The Letter for the King S1 (Netflix, ~6 hours) ★★★★

As fantasy tales go, this is a pretty good one, although really it’s a weak 4 (or perhaps a strong 3).  But the characters are pretty interesting, led primarily by Amir Wilson (who also appears in His Dark Materials), and the world is pretty engaging.  I also enjoyed how the horse was one of the smartest characters in the bunch.  Moderately generic fantasy, but I enjoyed it.

Grace and Frankie S6 (Netflix, ~6½ hours) ★★★★

This Netflix show has a premise (two couples just entering retirement age are radically shaken up when the two husbands run off with each other, leaving the two wives to band together despite significant issues of rubbing each other the wrong way) which might have descended into the contrived or the cliché.  But, thanks to an amazing cast—Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, Sam Waterston—and sharp writing, this half-hour comedy, at first seeming to have little substance, has turned into a show that consistently makes me laugh out loud at least once per episode, and many times more often than that.  With an interesting set of kids (including Baron Vaughn and June Diane Raphael) and suitors (including Ernie Hudson, Peter Gallagher, and Sam Elliott), it’s kept me entertained for six seasons and counting.

Carmen Sandiego S3 – S4 (Netflix, ~6½ hours) ★★★★

With a great voice cast, exciting plots, and a very understated educational bent, Netflix’s version of the geographically-inclined thief in the bright red coat is surprisingly good for both parents and kids.  This “thief” is more of a Robin Hood, except that instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, she’s stealing from the museums to keep away from the real criminals ... and then returning to the museums.  It’s a lot of fun, and these last two seasons wrap up the overarching plot in a satisfying and emotional way (despite the truncated S3, which was presumably due to the pandemic).  Recommended.

Spectrøs S1 (Netflix, ~7 hours) ★★★

You have to be okay with dubbing: not comically bad dubbing, but not really profesionally done either.  If you can get past that, this cultural mishmash of Brazilian history and Japanese ghost stories is actually pretty engaging, with mostly-interesting characters and a plot that will at least keep you entertained, though perhaps not provide too much mental challenge.  I watched it with the smallies; they also seemed to dig it.

American Horror Story 1984 (Hulu, ~7 hours) ★★★

As seasons of AHS go, this one is pretty good.  Not primo, like Murder House or Coven, but neither crap like Asylum or Roanoke.  A bit like Roanoke, it starts off in cliché territory (swapping cheesy paranormal docudrama for cheesy 80s slasher fest), then makes a series of left turns into unexpected territories.  I think 1984 succeeds where Roanoke fails, however, both in that the final destinations are more interesting, and also it doesn’t make us suffer through the uninteresting parts as long before it starts saying “gotcha!” So, you know ... better, but perhaps still not great.

The Good Fight S4 (CBS All Access, ~7 hours) ★★★

The Good Fight is not just a step above the show from which it was spun off; it’s a major improvement.  While I was watching it, I thought I liked Julianna Margulies just fine; now, however, I think I’m realizing that the worst part about The Good Wife was the good wife herself.  Stripped of that character, what remains—with almost entirely women in the major roles—is much more compelling.  Never afraid to address questions of politics, race, gender imbalance, family loyalty, cutthroat business, or deficiencies in our legal system, the first several seasons of The Good Fight are pretty amazing.  It’s losing a bit of steam lately, I’d say, but still holding my interest.  We’ll have to see where it goes from here.

Alice in Borderland S1 (Netflix, ~7 hours) ★★★

A good, solid 3, edging towards a 4, this Japanese show is decently dubbed and interestingly shot, with a weird premise that gives nothing away.  It’s enough like a standard dystopian, compete-for-your-life plot (à la Running Man or Hunger Games) that it’s familiar, but dissimilar enough that it still feels fresh.  The connection to Alice in Wonderland is mostly in the Japanese names (Alice becomes Arisu, the Cheshire Cat becomes Chishiya, and one character is named Usagi, which is apparently Japanese for “rabbit”), but, once that suggestion is planted firmly in your mind, you begin to see personality traits in common as well.  There are also some interesting gender role explorations.  It can get a little heavy-handed on the morality plays, though, which is the principal reason I don’t rate it higher.  Still, pretty entertaining.

Another Life S1 (Netflix, ~7½ hours) ★★★

Another entry in the proud tradition of claustrophobic sci-fi pioneered by Alien, this show was ... decent.  I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but I must confess it didn’t really stick with me all that much.  Not a waste of time, by any stretch, but nothing to write home about either.

American Horror Story Apocalypse (Netflix, ~7½ hours) ★★★★

As I mentioned above, the two best seasons of AHS are Murder House (the first one) and Coven (the third).  Apocalypse may well be its third best, as it not only takes a hard left into not-what-you-thought-it-was-going-to-be, but also wraps back around to both of those earlier, great seasons.  In fact, Apocalypse has such a great sense of closure that I’d almost rate it higher than at least one of the other two, except that the brilliance of those is what enables this in the first place.  If you’re a fan of fear (and blood), I strongly advise that you check this out, but only after you’ve watched Murder House and Coven first.

Dispatches from Elsewhere S1 (AMC+, ~7½ hours) ★★★★★

If you enjoy shows where you’re never completely sure what the fuck is going on—and even more so shows where the protatgonists themselves don’t know what the fuck is going on—then you’ll adore this one.  (And, contrariwise, if you don’t like such things, you’ll hate this.)  With an amazing cast that includes Jason Segel, Sally Field, André 3000, and an amazing trans actor named Eve Lindley, who I had not heard of before but was completely enchanted by, this show baffled me, thrilled me, blew my mind, made me think, made me laugh out loud, and even made me cry a few times.  And all with a layer of magic realism that sets it apart from the standard fare.  (By the way, when that layer is peeled back, don’t worry: there are more layers beneath.)

Next time, the conclusion of this exciting TV roundup.

__________

1 Like the final season of The Librarians.

2 Like the first season of Call Me Kat, the final episode of which has yet to air.

3 I was hunting tracks for Shadowfall Equinox, natch.

4 Which is why I haven’t finished it yet.

Isolation Report, Week #53

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

It’s been one year and two days since my personal pandemic began: I count it as having started on the Thursday when I got the message “don’t bother coming in to work; we’re sending everyone home for the foreseeable future.” That was March 12th of last year.  People all over have been “celebrating” this mark; Colbert has dubbed it his “quaranniversay.” At this time, perhaps it would be instructive to look back to our very first isolation report and see how well my thoughts have held up over the year.

• Numbers are flying around right now, and you don’t always know whether you can trust them, but by some estimates as many of 70% of the entire population (worldwide) will get it, and of those who contract it maybe 20% will have severe reactions and perhaps 2% will die.

This is a tough one.  First of all, most reported numbers don’t bother to distinguish between “getting it” and “severe reactions”; secondly, reported numbers likely don’t represent total cases; and finally, the death tolls have varied widely among different countries.  The first thing that should tell us is that how a country reacted to the pandemic really makes a huge difference.  The death tolls we’re seeing are really less about how fatal this disease is and how well equipped our healthcare systems were (or weren’t, in many cases).  But, taking the latest stats from Worldometer, worldwide infection rate has been about 1.5%, and death rate has been 0.03%.  On the other hand, the US infection rate has been closer to 9%, and the death rate more like 0.2%.  That’s a massive difference: only about a dozen countries are higher, and they’re all in Europe.  Many nations which are supposedly less “advanced” than us Western countries are beating the snot out of us in terms of responding to this virus.

So, overall, the rates didn’t live up to the boogeyman numbers that were being spouted, but then again, even at these rates it’s been pretty awful.  So let’s call that one a wash.

• But even on Monday when Christy tried to go to Costco, the toilet paper was all gone.  At this point we won’t even go out there any more: you have to wait in line to get in, apparently.

Oh, the naïvete.  Waiting in line to buy groceries is now just an everyday thing.

• Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  ...  On the other hand, I do understand what the health care people are saying.  There are basically two scenarios here:  In the first one, everyone gets the virus all at once, the number of serious cases spikes insanely, and the health care system is overwhelmed.  With insufficient resources, some people could die not because the virus killed them, but because they couldn’t get the care they needed to weather the sickness.

This is an interesting one.  Was I too dismissive of the danger of overwhelming our healthcare system?  Perhaps.  On the other hand, going back to those breakdowns by country, the death tolls in places like India (~0.01%) and South Korea (~0.003%, a full order of magnitude less than the global numbers) seem to prove that, with the proper response, it really could have been comparable to any other cold or flu.  Even if those nations are radically underreporting to make themselves look better, they still come out way ahead of the US, where an intense lack of leadership, and an unwillingness to infringe on people’s “rights” even so far as to say people must wear masks caused the ultimate situation to be far worse than I ever imagined it would get.

On the other hand, is it possible that less draconian recommendations might have met with less resistance, and therefore would have been, in the end, more effective?  I think it’s possible, but it’s really hard to hypothesize.  We also have zero concept of how many lives were lost by ancillary causes: how many people committed suicide due to isolation? how many lost sleep, depressed their immune system, and ended up getting some completely different fatal disease?  These are unanswerable questions.  My final gut feeling is that if our leaders and health experts had been suggesting even looser restrictions, we probably would have ended up coming out even worse.  But, then again, if there had been looser restrictions, but those restrictions had been messaged with consistency and lived by example by the people actually in charge of the country?  That could have made a real difference.  But we had what we had, so speculation is pointless.

• I’m struck by what Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show one night this past week: COVID-19 has killed somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 people in the past 3 months, worldwide.  In the U.S., just one country in the world, 3,000 people die in car accidents every day.

Okay, first thing to note is that either I misheard Trevor, or he himself was confused: 3,000 deaths per day is not what we have in the US; that’s closer to a worldwide figure (in fact, according to the WHO, it’s a bit low).  But I think my point was still valid, if a bit over-hyped, for all that—at the time.  So, let’s compare how good COVID turned out to be at killing us vs automobiles.  Worldwide, cars take out around 1.35 million of us per year.  COVID, over the course of the past year, has hit about 2.66 million.  COVID wins, beating out automobiles by about 2 to 1.  So I guess my point didn’t stand the test of time: we really should have been more worried about this virus than about going to work in the morning.  In the US, as always, it’s much worse: traffic deaths have been trending downwards from around 40k per year since 2007; COVID deaths broke half a million a month or so ago.  Overall, looking at the numbers, you were over 15x as likely to die from COVID in 2020 as you were to die in a car wreck in 2019.  So ... yeah.  I biffed that one, for sure.

• Colbert aired a single show with no audience (as did Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), but that’s it (at least for Colbert; not sure if WWDTM will continue, albeit audience-less).  The Daily Show said at first they would continue to do shows sans audience, but they too gave it up late on Friday.  And here’s where I worry that we’re going too far.

But, dammit, I’m going to stand by this one.  Both Colbert and Noah (as well as many other folks like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers) did come back, eventually, and I think it’s made all the difference.  That first month or so, without any trusted source for news of what was going on in the world, was what was really isolating for me.  Once those guys came back, the whole sorry sad situation got a lot more bearable.  Nowadays, while I really hope things get back to normal at some point, I’m doing okay.  This is survivable.  It’s not been to much to ask after all, I suppose.

• Because, at the end of the day (or more likely month, in this case), it will be difficult for us to quantify how many lives our choices have saved.  But I worry that the fundamental changes to our way of life will be all too apparent.

Okay, first let us all laugh at the dumb innocence of “more likely month” ... oh, how little I suspected that I would still be writing these crazy-ass isolation reports twelve months later.  Beyond that, I do think it’s impossible for us to quantify how many lives we saved by telling people to sing “Happy Birthday” while washing their hands, or not to touch their face (which I still maintain is essentially unachievable).  I think it’s impossible to quantify how many lives we saved by telling people to wear masks.  But, then again, it’s also impossible to guess how many lives we lost because of people refusing to do these things.  About the only thing I do feel confident in stating is that we could have done better ... because many other countries did.

I do still worry about the fundamental changes to our way of life.  Not in a “I refuse to do these things” sort of way, because I recognize that the things were, in the end, necessary, at least to some extent: those countries where they were more successful at containing the virus were often those places where they really did lock down the populace and force people to comply with the rules.  But more in a wistful, “I’m sad for what we lost” sort of way.  Will I be returning to the office at my company any time soon?  No.  My company no longer has an office: the lease expired over the course of the year, and it didn’t make sense to renew it.  So the working from home is the new normal.  Of course, I’m lucky: there are many businesses that will never recover.  Will we ever go to movie theaters as we once did?  What about museums?  Will in-person learning ever really be the standard way to do it again, or will it just be a fringe thing that only diehard students attempt?  Will we ever sit down in restaurants on a regular basis again, or will all food places just keep on delivering, because all the ones that don’t have fallen by the wayside?  I have no answers for these questions.  Perhaps we’ll know in the coming months.  Perhaps we will only truly understand the extent of the changes in the coming years.  I’ve no doubt that some history class somewhere will be studying this period in our lives as some sort of turning point ... I just don’t know exactly what we’re turning towards.

Well, that about wraps it up for my serious lookback on a year of isolation reports.  Next week, I’m going to attempt to look back on a lighter side, as I try to figure out—and report!—all the television I’ve watched over the past year.  Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.

A Spreadsheet Story

The main reason you won’t get a proper blog post this week is that it’s my middle child’s birthday weekend, and I’m at their beck and call.  But there’s another possibly vaguely (probably not really) interesting reason as well, so I thought I’d share it with you.

For most of my life, I’ve been one of those annoying OCD-but-disorganized people.  All my CDs had to be alphabetized just so, and the bills in my money clip had to be facing the same way, but all my workspaces were a horrible mess and I rarely had any firm concept of what I was supposed to be working on next.  A few years back I made a conscious decision to get myself organized: as we get older, it’s not so much that our brains lose the ability to juggle all those myriad of things we’re supposed to be remembering that we have to do, it’s more that we finally realize how terrible we were at it all along and that it’s only getting worse with age.  So I settled on a Method™ and ran with it.

The one I chose was Getting Things Done (sometimes referred to by its fans as GTD), and I learned a lot from it.  Which is not to say that I embraced it fully: the biggest issue I have with it is that David Allen, being about 20 years older than me (he’s actually about halfway between the ages of my mother and father), loves paper.  There’s lots of writing things on paper and filing paper and moving paper around.  I don’t do paper.  But of course the system can be adapted to computer software, and there are many GTD programs out there.  But part of the issue with being all OCD-y and a programmer is that I can’t adapt my way of working to someone else’s software: I gotta write my own.

So I created a massive Google Sheets spreadsheet with oodles of code macros (in Javascript, which I really don’t like to program in) and, whenever it does something I don’t like, I change it.  I can’t really say that it’s a proper implementation of GTD, but I’m sure that anyone familiar with GTD would recognize most of what’s going on in there.  I didn’t take GTD as a blueprint for exactly how to organize my shit, but I absorbed many of its lessons ... maybe that should be a whole blog post on its own.  But for now, I have to admit one thing.  A fuck up I made.

Back when I was originally designing my GTD-spreadsheet-monstrosity, I made a fateful decision.  When I complete a task, I don’t actually delete it ... I just mark it completed (by adding a date in the “Completed” column) and then it disappears from my “shit you need to do today” view.  But it’s still there.  Partially I did this because, as a programmer who mainly works with databases, I’ve had many years of conditioning that you never delete data because you always regret it later, and partially because I thought it would be cool to have a record of everything I’d accomplished (so now my todo list is also my diary).  Sounded perfectly rational at the time.

Now, I’m not going to go into all the details of how GTD works, but one of its main concepts is that you track everything. EVERYTHING.  This gives you a lot of confidence that you haven’t forgotten anything, because, you know ... you track everything.  I’m coming up on my 4-year anniversary of tracking everything in my spreadsheet and I’ve accumulated over 15 thousand items: tasks, longer blocks of time for projects, things I was waiting on other people to get back to me on, etc etc etc.  It works out to about 4 thousand a year, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually increasing over time and I’m soon to hit 5 grand.  Now, if you’re a big spreadsheet person (as many people are these days, in many different areas of business) you may have heard technogeeks tell you not to use a spreadsheet as a database.  Being a technogeek myself, I knew this perfectly well ... and I did it anyway.  I did it advisedly, for reasons of expediency.  Because I didn’t want to spend months trying to develop my own application from scratch, putitng me even further behind on getting organized.  The point was to get up and running quickly, which I did.  But now I’m paying the price.

This weekend, while sitting around waiting for my child to inform me of the next videogame I was drafted into playing or the next meal I was conscripted into obtaining, I had a brainstorm about how to make this system way more efficient.  It’s not a proper fix, but it would radically decrease the time I currently spend sitting around waiting for my spreadsheet to respond, so I figured I better do it.  I thought: this won’t be too hard to do.  Of course, it was harder than I thought—it’s always harder than you think—and I haven’t gotten things completely back to normal yet (and I stayed up way too late last night), but I made some really great strides, and I’m seeing an even bigger speed-up than I thought.  So I’m pretty pleased.  Even though I’ll probably be fucking with it for the next several weeks.

So that’s why I have no time to make a proper post.  Except mainly the birthday thing.  Next week will be better, I’m sure.

Isolation Report, Week #51

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, our family is heading into the March birthday season, that annual time when we have two birthday weekends of our own, not to mention one of the two birthday recipients’ best friends, who also has a birthday in there.  In happier times, we’ve sometimes combined hers with one of ours and had joint celebrations.  This year, of course, it will be a pandemic birthday.

And, what makes me sad, and angry, and frustrated, is that, being that we live in America and are talking about March birthdays, this will be the first crop of kids now experiencing their second pandemic birthday in a row.  That sucks for them.  It would suck for anyone, but in this case I’m talking about kids celebrating birthdays ranging from their 7th (our youngest child, last year) to their 15th (our middle child and their friend, this year).  I mean, I can’t imagine how hard it would suck to have your 16th birthday, or your 18th, or your 21st, in all this shit, and I know there are people going through that too—I don’t happen to know any, but just stastically there have to be.  But at those ages (yes, I would argue even at 16) you’re starting to develop some maturity.  You’re starting to understand that, while the world is often awash with possibilities, sometimes it just sucks, and you have to learn to start accepting that.  But 7 – 15 ... man, those are your peak years of innocence, I feel.  Those are the times when, unless you’ve had some hard luck or some hard circumstances, you shouldn’t really have to be aware that life sucks sometimes.  You shouldn’t even have to think about it sucking for other people, much less yourself.

But, this is the world we live in, so we make the best of it.  We do Zoom birthday parties, and hold online gaming events, and, if we’re lucky enough to have social bubbles, maybe do very small parties within those.  And we make sure we let our kids know that they are still loved, even if the world is kinda shitting on them right now.  And we keep telling them that this won’t be forever.

Hopefully, we’re not lying.

Tumbledown Flatland I

"I Have Water, I Have Rum"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

In response to a query from Elwood about what kind of music the bar usually has, a charater from The Blues Brothers famously replies “Oh, we got both kinds: we got country and western!” This is meant to be a joke.  The joke is supposed to be that “country and western” is really only one kind of music.  But, perhaps oddly, the real punch line, coming some 15 minutes later or so, is that the Blues Brothers band ends up just playing the theme from Rawhide over and over: a tune which is decidedly western ... but definitely not country.

Because, you see, country music and western music are actually entirely different.  Country music is from the eastern United States: it is mountain music from the Appalachians.  Westeran music is exactly what it says: music derived from the westward expansion.  Country is the music of coal miners (and their daughters); western is the music of cowboys.  But the most important difference between the two is that I hate country music: it’s one of only two kinds of music that I really can’t handle.¹  Western, on the other hand ...

When I was a kid, I had a few albums of my own; they were mostly Disney albums, such as Winnie the Pooh or The Aristocats or The Haunted Mansion.  But, for some weird reason, I also had a hand-me-down copy of this Lorne Green album, which included songs like “Bonanza” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Western music, to me, has always been about cowboys camping on the endless prairie, singing songs with a vaguely lonesome air, as the tumbleweeds go rolling by ...

The genesis of this mix was Chris Isaak’s soft western ballad “Blue Spanish Sky.” I first mentioned Isaak way back on Smokelit Flashback I—the very first entry in this series—and I referred to him as “as close to country as I get.” Truly, Isaak is alt-country at best, and this tune is a brilliant example of a modern take on the western genre.²  The guitar shows that influence of Mexican music which you don’t hear in country, and the verses are truly lonesome rather than lonely, which is the best description I can give for the proper difference between western and country, underscored even more so by the trumpet, which is not upbeat and brassy like you might hear on Salsatic Vibrato, but more sad and, well ... lonesome.³  Really, my only problem with this song is the bridge (it doens’t really have a chorus, just a single bridge before the trumpet breakdown), which I always felt changed the tenor of the song too much.  But, eventually, I came to accept it:⁴ it’s even more referent of the cowboys of the American West, with a touch of the yodeling cowpoke.  And the lyrics, of course, are pitch-perfect:

It’s a slow sad Spanish song;
I knew the words but I sang them wrong.
The one I love has left and gone
Without me ...

Surely there must be other songs out there that I liked in the present, I thought, that would remind me of pleasant times in the past listening to Lorne Green?

At the time, I was deep into True Blood, and its theme song, “Bad Things,” was too slinky and echoey for me to consider it properly country (though Jace Everett is certainly a country singer).  But when Everett isn’t supplying a country twang almost too much for me to bear, he drops into a sultry bass that gives you the shivers.  The electric guitar counterpointed with the steel guitar, combined with the Hammond organ, also gives it a decidedly uncountry feel.  I also thought of Firefly’s opening theme, which is almost country, but with just enough blues and western to rescue it.  Then I thought of the extremely oddball song “Dakota,” from Wire Train’s third album, the one which was such a departure from their early, almost-British-sounding jangle-pop.  And no song moreso than this one, which is lonely and haunted, starting out soft and then bursting forth, but still somehow downbeat.  And then I think I remembered “Underneath the Bunker,” by the absolute masters of jangle-pop, R.E.M.  It’s s bit more upbeat, but still has some of that Latin influence,⁵ and the weird, processed vocals which provide our volume title.  And then ... then I was sort of stuck for a long while.

This mix may have had the longest “stewing” time, from initial idea to being declared sufficiently done.  I’ve added songs here and there, as I found them: “Ghost of a Texas Ladies’ Man” by Concrete Blonde (a bit silly, but fun), or “the sadness of the witch” by Falling You (the rainstick really sells the western angle), or “Parking Lot” by emmet swimming (purely on the strength of the steel-guitar-adjacent stringwork by my friend Erik⁶), or “Ghost song” by hands upon black earth⁷ (more rainstick and other Native American percussion and chanting).  When I finally decided to pick up the ultra-classic Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, I discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) “Gold Dust Woman,” which seems to fit perfectly here.  When I discovered Myles Cochran,⁸ I was quite enamored of “Wait a While,” and I think it spent a bit of time as the potential mix opener.  But then I found “Big Sky” by the Reverend Horton Heat, normally known more for psychobilly, but actually spanning a pretty electic range of styles.⁹  Something about the guitar work in this instrumental really screams western at me, even though it’s almost certainly the fastest song on the volume.

Other not-too-surprising candidates include Meat Puppets, Iron & Wine, House of Freaks, and Mazzy Star.  In the case of the Seattle ostensibly-grunge band, “Roof with a Hole” is one of my favorites of theirs, and the lyrics (e.g. “the roof’s got a hole in it, and everything’s been ruined by the rain”) sell the lonesome vibe.  With the folk-adjacent Sam Beam vehicle, I think it’s the banjo that qualifies it.  The Richmond duo’s amazing album Monkey on a Chain Gang contains several tracks which could work here; after some thought, I went with “Long Black Train,” where Johnny Hott’s fantastic toms give the song a rolling beat that perfectly embodies its title.  Finally, there are many great choices from the Santa-Monica-based shoegazers, but their biggest hit “Fade into You” gives us some great steel guitar, tambourine, and a particularly lonesome vibe.

Tumbledown Flatland I
[ I Have Water, I Have Rum ]

“Big Sky” by Reverend Horton Heat, off Liquor in the Front
“Wait a while” by Myles Cochran, off Marginal Street
“Bad Things” by Jace Everett [Single]
“Gold Dust Woman” by Fleetwood Mac, off Rumours
“Good Times Gone” by Nickelback, off Silver Side Up
“Firefly: Main Title” by Sonny Rhodes [Single]
“Blue Spanish Sky” by Chris Isaak, off Heart Shaped World
“the sadness of the witch” by Falling You, off Touch
“Ghost song” by hands upon black earth, off hands upon black earth
“Passage Three” by Steve Roach, Michael Stearns & Ron Sunsinger, off Kiva
“Dakota” by Wire Train, off Wire Train ¹⁰
“Roof with a Hole” by Meat Puppets, off Too High to Die
“Long Black Train” by House of Freaks, off Monkey on a Chain Gang
“Parking Lot” by emmet swimming, off Arlington to Boston
“Ghost of a Texas Ladies' Man” by Concrete Blonde, off Walking in London
“Underneath the Bunker” by R.E.M., off Lifes Rich Pageant
“Teeth in the Grass” by Iron & Wine, off Our Endless Numbered Days
“Fade into You” by Mazzy Star, off So Tonight That I Might See
“Taqsim” by Stellamara, off Star of the Sea
“Feels Like the End of the World” by Firewater, off The Golden Hour
“Malagueña salerosa (La malagueña)” by Chingón, off Mexican Spaghetti Western

Total:  21 tracks,  78:18

How about the less likely choices?  Well, Nickelback shouldn’t be entirely unexpected: their alt-metal, “post-grunge,”¹¹ style is western-adjacent, and they hail from Alberta, which is Canada’s prairie country (directly north of Montana, in fact).  “Good Times Gone” contains a lot of bendy, echoey guitar work that fits in very nicely here, and Chad Kroeger’s vocals contain just enough twang to sell it without crossing into country territory.  Plus it just rocks.

Kiva, the album by 3 big names in ambient music (Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, and actual Native American Ron Sunsinger), consists of very long Native-American-inspired ambient pieces, separated by shorter bridges named “Passage One” through “Passage Four” (and concluding with “The Center”).  “Passage Three” is a piece that I really felt captured some of the feel of the wind on the wide, flat lands of the American West, and I thought it made a good transition into the whistling, wind-like opening strains of “Dakota.”

And then we have the closing stretch.  After “Fade into You” fades out, I thought that “Taqsim” from the normally Balkan-leaning Stellamara,¹², with its lonely stringed instrument (I believe it’s an oud), made a perfect bridge into Firewater’s “Feels Like the End of the World.” Firewater’s insanely good The Golden Hour was the result of Tod A. spending three years abroad, absorbing the musical styles of Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.  The jangly guitars here and the overall melancholy air of the lyrics really cemented its place on this mix, despite being probably the furthest away from properly “western” music on this volume.

And that leads squarely into our closer, “Malagueña salerosa” by Robert Rodruiguez’s Chingón.  This song is one of the most well known mariachi ballads, and it demands that the lead singer (in this case, Alex Ruiz) hold a note for what seems like forever—literally, I can’t even hum the note for as long as Alex continuously sings it.  The lyrics, if translated, are suitably sad for a lonesome western: the singer speaks to a witty, charming woman from Málaga, Spain, noting her beautiful eyes and calling her stunning and bewitching, but then says “If you look down on me for being poor, I concede that you are right” and, in the final verse, pleads “I don’t offer you riches: I offer you my heart ... I offer you my heart in exchange for what I lack.” From Chingón’s excellent album Mexican Spaghetti Western (which, goshdarnit, has the theme right there on the tin), this song always epitomized to me the Latin influence on the western genre, and what depth of emotion it could bring to the music.

Next time, let’s go back to the 80s.  I kinda like it there.

__________

1 The other, as I’ve mentioned before, is opera.

2 As is “Kings of the Highway,” actually, which is the track of his that I used on Smokelit Flashback.

3 More like the sax breaks you might hear on Moonside by Riverlight.

4 Though not to love it, unfortunately.

5 I’m guessing habanera, specifically, though I am no expert on the Latin American musical styles.

6 You may recall that Erik of emmet swimming was the first employee of my software company.

7 Another Magnatune find; I first mentioned them back on Smokelit Flashback IV.

8 First mentioned back on Rose-Coloured Brainpan I.

9 To prove it, note that the good Reverend has appeared thus far on Moonside by Riverlight, Porchwell Firetime, Cantosphere Eversion, and even Yuletidal Pools.

10 Normally I prefer to link to a page where you can give someone money for the music.  However, this album doesn’t appear to be available anywhere in that way, at least in digital form.  If you’re into CDs, you can get it from Amazon, but I suspect I’m in a distinct minority on that score these days.

11 Still find that label meaningless, but it’s common.

12 First encountered on Shadowfall Equinox I but since seen on volumes III and IV of that mix, as well as on Apparently World.

Isolation Report, Week #49

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, it’s a been a few weeks since I checked in on the political front, and that means it’s been long enough that the Senate performed exactly as expected and acquitted Trump of inciting the riot that stormed the Capitol and resulted in several deaths.  The majority of the Republicans, of course, had made up their minds beforehand.  If this were an actual trial, such potential jurors would have been dismissed as prejudiced ... in fact, the roots of the word “prejudiced”—meaning to “pre-judge”—are specifically referring to this type of behavior.  There were apparently only seven Republicans who were brave enough to vote to convict someone of doing something they very obviously did (on video, even!), and two of them aren’t running for re-election.  Think about what that means: for 86% of Republicans (or at least 86% of Repulican senators) care more about getting re-elected than about being honest.  Even if you’re a Republican, that should concern you.  Even if you believe Trump that the election was stolen, you can see that he did the thing he’s being accused of, right?  Hell, even if you agree that storming the Capitol was the right thing to do, and even if you believe that the Deep State government has no right at all to hold him accountable for his actions, you still understand that he incited the riot ... right?  Hell, if you were at the riot, you believe that: the Senators were shown footage of rioters chanting “We were invited by the president of the United States!” So he did it.  There isn’t much debate about that.  Senators voting to acquit are lying.  Maybe we could dream up some motives for that lie other than wanting re-election, but sometimes (as William of Occam was wont to say) the simplest explanation is the right one.

To be fair, many Republicans are concerned about this.  So much so that many prominent Republicans met to discuss the possibility of forming a new party.  They eventually rejected that idea, though, because a third party would not be successful.  Which right there ought to tell you that we have a serious problem with our system.  “We have to stay with the crazy people because the system is designed to help them remain in power” is never the position you want to be in.  And, honestly, my problem with this whole plan is partially the Democrats.  Sure, I’m absolutely a progressive and more or less a liberal, but I am not a Democrat.  I don’t want the Democrats to have too much political power and control everything from here on out any more than the more conservative among you do.  Furthermore, the Democrats are half the reason that a third party is not viable.  For all that they tear at each other’s throats, when it comes to shutting out third parties, the Democrats and the Republicans are in lockstep.  And, ironically, they will now pay the price for that decision, because having the Republicans split in two would only help the Democrats.

Ah, but enough about politics.  How’s our pandemic going?  Well, not so great, honestly.  The Mother had to go to the emergency room for severe pain about 3 weeks ago; they completely ignored her advising them that it was probably her gallbladder and said maybe she had some strained muscles in her back, shot her full of a souped up version of ibuprofen and sent her home.  She got an appointment with her doctor, who told her it was probably her gallbladder but she needed an MRI to confirm.  She got the MRI, the results said it was her gallbladder, and shd had a followup appointment with her doctor next week.  But, before that could come around, she was back in the emergency room with even more extreme pain, and this time they had the brains to work out that, hey: maybe it’s her gallbladder.  So, this past Monday, after spending the weekend in the hospital, she had an emergency gallbladder removal.  She’s fine now, and home, and recovering, albeit somewhat slowly.

Now, you may remember we have this little thing called a pandemic going on right now—it’s sort of the basis for this blog post series, in fact.  What’s it like, having to go to the hospital in the middle of the pandemic, even if for a non-pandemic-related cause?  Well, the first thing is, I can’t tell you firsthand: the farthest I ever got into the hospital was the front desk, when I went to drop off some knitting and a cell phone charging plug.  In fact, even taking her to the emergency room meant driving her, dropping her off at the door, then waiting in the parking lot until they let her in.  Yep, that’s right: when you walk up to the emergency room (at least ours), a security guard comes out, asks you what you’re in for, then makes you wait outside while they figure out what to do with you.  Once they did let her in, all I could really do was go home and wait for news.  I didn’t see her again until they wheeled her out to go home.  (And of course that was days and days later, because I dropped her off on a Friday night, and when you need “emergency” surgery on a weekend, that means you wait until Monday.  But that’s probably a whole separate rant.)

But my secondhand report is, the hospital staff is haggard.  They’ve had to see a lot of death lately, and they’re probably being pushed to their limits ... if not beyond.  I could almost forgive the original idiot doctor who misdiagnosed her with “back pain,” except for the extra $400 it’s going to cost me (that’s what it’ll cost me, mind you: it’s going to cost the insurance company much more).  But we’re lucky enough to have a hospital very close to us, and second time was the charm and she got a good doctor, and excellent nursees, and overall we’re pretty happy.  And, even though she’s still in a lot of pain from the surgery itself, the lack of a gallbladder full of gallstones (which the surgeon described as “highly inflamed”) means that she feels a lot better than she did when she went in.  So we can’t complain.  Too much.

Hopefully we’ve exhausted our drama quotient for the year (both personally and politically), and the rest of 2021 will be completely boring.  At this point, I’m looking forward to that.

Saladosity, Part 17: Chef's

[This is the seventeenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

A good chef’s salad is a thing of beauty.  It is both meat and veggies in a wonderfully balanced presentation, and also it’s delicious.  Now, most people will agree that a chef’s salad must have meat and cheese in addition to the eggs, but there’s a multitude of different opinions on which meat and cheese to use.  This is the recipe that I learned at my first non-fast-food-restaurant job, a college dive bar called the Mason Jar Pub (near my alma mater of George Mason University).  It wasn’t a very good restaurant overall, but the chef’s salad was pretty decent, and that’s where I learned to make it.  I still love eating it today.

The Protein

In my opinion, the absolute best meats to use are turkey and roast beef.  One of the tricks is to find lunch meat that is sliced perfectly: too thick and it’ll be hard to assemble, too thin and it’ll just rip into shreds.  Also, turkey that is sliced into a perfect, large circle is ideal; you can be a little more flexible on the shape of the roast beef.  Now, you can also cut it yourself, but for one thing it’s a pain in the ass, and for another it’s hard to get the slices just right.  Unless you have an industrial meat slicer.  But then you’re likely to cut your fingers off, so that’s not a great solution either.  Just buy good quality meats with no nitrites and you’ll be fine.

The Cheese

Now, you could use any cheese you like.  But I’m going to suggest two criteria to narrow it down:

• You need a cheese with good plasticity.  For this reason, I find that cheddar or Swiss are terrible choices.  When you try to put everything together, those types of cheese just crumble into a big mess

• I personally think that white cheeses just complement lunch meats better.  Sure, a decent Colby could work, but is it going to taste as good as some of your other options?

So the obvious choice is provolone, and it should definitely be your go-to if you have difficulty finding decent choices at your market, or you’re just not adventurous when it comes to cheese.  If you can find sliced mozzarella, that could also work, but I find it a bit bland for this particular application.  Monterey Jack is not bad, and if you wanted to be super fancy, Edam or Jarlsberg would be the way to go (I think Gouda is both not quite plastic enough and just a bit too strong).  But my absolute favorite is havarti.  It’s got a great flavor that is mild but not bland, you can often find it pre-sliced,¹ and it has the perfect amount of flexibility.  If you’ve not yet tried it, definitely give it a go.

The Eggs

The other protein you’ll need is hard-boiled eggs, of course.  There’s not much art to boiling an egg, but still some folks have difficulty getting them to that perfect consistency without the annoying green rings forming on them.²  So here’s how I do it.

Possibly you have an electric kettle for boiling water for tea.  They’re awesome: you fill it with water, push the button, and voilà: it boils, then turns itself off.  They don’t last forever though: after a bit, you’ll find yours starts to look a bit ragged ... maybe it has a few waterspots here and there ... maybe the lid doesn’t fit perfectly any more.  So you just buy a new one, right?  They’re not that expensive, after all.  So what do you do with the old one?  Just throw it away, I guess?

No.  You use it to hard-boil eggs in.

Two eggs is typically enough for a chef’s salad, but I often do 5 or 6 at a time and just keep them in the fridge.³  You lower the eggs gently into the empty kettle, hopefully not cracking any,⁴ just barely cover them with cold water, plug it in and hit that button.  Now walk away.  The water will come to a boil, the kettle turns itself off, then the eggs just sit there as the water slowly cools.  Bam! perfect hard-boiled eggs every time.  Come back once the water is cool, or whenever you like.  Hours later, even—that’s the beauty of this method.  No timers, you can’t possibly overcook them, it just ... works.

Dump the water out and either use the eggs right away or stick ’em in the fridge for later.  For chef’s salad purposes, peel a couple of eggs and crack out that handy dandy egg slicer I told you to buy when we talked about salad equipment.  Open, close, and you have perfect slices; just throw the top and bottom slices out, because they’re all white and no yolk.  Unless, you know, you’re into that sort of thing.  I usually just feed them to the dog.  Or my daughter.

The Dressing

Now, you can put any old sort of dressing on a chef’s salad that you like, but I’m a firm believer that this is the perfect place to break out a lovely Thousand Island dressing.  The problem is, most store-bought TI’s are going to be full of stuff that you may not be too thrilled with, like soybean oil, and preservatives, and unnecessary sugar.  But, you know what?  Thousand Island dressing is one of the simplest things in the world: it’s nothing but mayo, ketchup, and pickle relish.⁵  You could make that yourself.

So let’s do that.

Thousand Island Dressing

Now, first thing I have to warn you is, it’s practically impossible to make a good Thousand Island dressing without any added sugar, because it’s almost impossible to make ketchup without any added sugar.  So this will not be Whole30 compliant, unless you’re dedicated enough to go out and buy Primal ketchup.  But you certainly don’t need any sugar beyond what’s in the ketchup itself, so just get a good quality ketchup and don’t stress too much.  It won’t have very much sugar.

The second thing I’m going to warn you about is, this isn’t a particularly sweet TI.  It’s going to be a bit on the tangy side.  Personally, I consider that a feature, but your mileage may vary.

After a lot of fiddling, I’ve managed to come up with the following, easy-to-remember formula:

• 1 squirt of dijon mustard
• 2 heavy pinches of salt
• 3 big spoonfuls of mayo
• 4 generous squirts of ketchup
• 5 small spoonfuls of pickle relish, or 5 whole pickle slices
• 6 grinds of black pepper

For the mayo, just use the homemade mayo I taught you how to make when we did the autumnal salad.  For the pickles or relish, my preference is to use dill pickles, from which I make my own relish.  You can use sweet relish, or sweet (sometimes called “bread and butter”) pickles, but that’s more sugar, and it’s not necessary.⁶  You could also buy dill pickle relish, but I’ve never found that anywhere other than Whole Foods, and who can afford that?  So just make your own.

If you’re using whole pickles—and let me stress that I’m not talking about a whole pickle spear, but just a slice such as you might find on a hamburger—then you need a food processor, or perhaps a stick blender.  Personally, I just take a whole jar of pickles and dump it into the blender (don’t forget to add half the juice as well!) and make dill pickle relish in bulk.⁷  If you’re using relish, you can literally just put everything in a bowl and stir it with the spoon you used for the mayo.  (If you’re not sure what I mean by “big spoonful” of mayo, I’m talking about a tablespoon—the kind you eat out of, not necessarily the measuring kind.  But they’re probably pretty close to each other.)

You can also add some white vinegar, if you want it even more tangy, but I find that the relish will bring along enough vinegar on its own.  You can also add a small amount of garlic powder, if you want it to have a bit more sharpness.  Or substitute yellow mustard for the dijon if you find it a bit too sharp.  But basically it’s just the ketchup, the mayo, and the pickle relish, and everything thing else is just for flavor.⁸

If you have more than you need for your salad(s), put the rest in a jar and stick it in the fridge.  Use it on your burgers, if you like.

Chef’s salad

Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.

On your cutting board, put down a slice of turkey.  Put a slice of roast beef on top, or maybe two slices if they’re small, but don’t overlap them too much.  Now lay a slice of cheese over that.  Don’t center the roast beef and the cheese on the turkey; rather, make it closer to the edge that’s closest to you.  Now roll up the turkey, away from you.  The turkey is almost certainly the roundest, and probably the least likely to fall apart, so it’s the best choice for the outside layer.  The rolling up will naturally push the inner layers toward the other edge, but, because you placed them off-center, they won’t move enough to push out past the turkey.  The stiffness of the cheese will help keep it together too, unless you ignored me and used cheddar or Swiss, in which case it’ll just break into bits and make a big mess.  If you do the whole thing right, you get a meat-and-cheese roll-up which will naturally hold itself together.  Cut off the messy bits at either end of the roll-up, because they’re not uniform; either just eat them, or feed them to your dog (or, again: to your daughter).  Take what’s left and cut it into quarters and turn each on its side: you end up with beautifully marbled discs of awesomeness.

Now do that a few more times if you’re making chef’s salad for the whole family (and why wouldn’t you be?).  My general rule of thumb is one roll-up per person and one extra.  Two for an individual salad might be too much, but then again you can just eat the extra discs later.⁹

Put your base veggies in a shallow bowl.  Wikipedia will tell you that you need cucumbers and tomatoes at a minimum, but honestly I don’t care for tomatoes in my chef’s salad.  (Cucumbers, on the other hand, are always a good call.)  But, really, whatever veggies you’ve already got chopped up is fine.  Now put your little meat discs on top of the veggies; I like to put one at each compass point and one in the center, but arrange however seems best to you.  Put one slice of egg on each disc.  Now put a normal amount of the homemade Thousand Island dressing ... maybe even a light amount.  Lean toward the lighter side.  Personally, while I like to eat my salad veggies with a spoon (I despise chasing small veggie bits around my plate with the fork), you really need to eat the egg-topped discs with a fork in a single bite each ... this may be the only salad where a spork is appropriate.  I usually just end up using a fork and a spoon, but you do you.  Delicious, nutritious, and very filling.

Next time, we’ll stretch our definition of what “salad” actually means.

__________

1 For instance, I buy that way from—where else?—Trader Joe’s.

2 Don’t forget: the green rings are unsightly, but they won’t hurt you.  Kind of like when your avocadoes turn brown: you can still eat them safely, they’re just not as pretty.

3 Useful for healthy snacks, and also for other salads.  Natch.

4 If you do crack one, you’ll just get wisps of egg white in your water.  Which isn’t the end of the world, but it does make a big mess in your electric kettle, which is why you only use old ones for this.

5 Interestingly enough, this is also the exact recipe for the “special sauce” that many burger joints use.  Yes, that’s right: your Big Mac basically just has Thousand Island dressing on it.

6 Or, in my opinion, good.

7 If you’ve got an extra pickle jar laying around, you could also do half the jar and save the other half for eating, if you’re into that sort of thing.  I’m not, but my daughter would be irked at me if I didn’t leave her any pickles for snacking on.

8 Okay, the mustard can also help with keeping it from separating in the fridge.  But mostly for flavor.

9 Honestly, sometimes I just make these meat-and-cheese cylinders without the salad and just eat them without even bothering to cut them into discs.

Aye aye skipper ...

Well, I’m up in the game rotation again: time to get back to the Family Campaign.  My littlest one specifically requested it, so that’s a nice feeling.  Plus there’s some family medical issues flying around, and some work stuff ... anyhow, no time for a proper post this week.  So sorry not sorry.

Still: tune in next week.  There’ll probably be something to talk about.  Probably.

D&D and Me: Part 9 (All in the Family)

[This is the ninth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, I talked about fifth edition D&D (5e) and how its popularity surprised and delighted long-time D&D fans, myself among them.]

So now there was a new edition, a new attitude towards the game, and, most of all, a whole new type of content: streaming D&D games.  I tried a bunch before I found Relics and Rarities, which is what really got me excited about D&D again.  Once I found that, I started obsessively checking out all of them.  Well, except for the obvious one: Critical Role.

There are a number of reasons I waited so long to give CR a chance.  Their first campaign (referred to either by the group name of the characters—Vox Machina—or simply as “C1”) has 115 episodes ... that’s over 447 hours of video to watch (thank you CritRoleStats).  Even if you skip over all the announcements and the breaks and whatnot, it would be over 373 hours: if I did nothing but eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and watch C1, it would still take me around 23 days to get through it all.  So that was one big reason.  But probably the bigger reason was just that it was the most popular (as I mentioned last time), and I have always resisted liking the most popular thing.  It’s a personal failing, I know.  But eventually I decided it was only fair to give it a chance, and I could start with their second campaign and not have nearly as much content to wade through.  After just a few episodes, I was hooked.  One thing I that I particularly loved was how Matt (CR’s DM) set up the story by running several “one-shot” adventures¹ for small groups of characters.  Though these happened off-screen, it was obvious what the ramifications were: each character got the chance to develop from their initial character sheet in a smaller, more controlled setting before joining together in a larger group.  It’s very common for a character to change somewhat, mostly personality-wise, from your initial concept once you start inhabiting them at the table, and it also generally takes a while before you become comfortable with all the features and powers on your sheet.  With these shorter, almost-solo adventures,²  all the awkward bits could be gotten out of the way.  The first episode of C2 shows this perfectly: a few relationships are established, all the players are comfortable in the skins of their characters, and rules-fumbling—the inevitable “wait, how does this work again?”—is kept to a minimum.  This was a big inspiration for what would eventually become the Family Campaign.

But the biggest (if most abstract) impact of CR on my home games were to remind me of the joy of D&D as long-form storytelling.  A lot of streaming D&D out there consists of one-shots (like Lost Odyssey) or limited series (like Relics and Rarities), and many of those are fantastic.  But what CR (and also the Balance arc of The Adventure Zone) reminded me was just how awesome it is to have that open-ended, anything-can-happen storyling going on, where every character’s backstory somehow ties into the overall plot, but there’s also some world-threatening evil to be addressed, and quests to resovle, and intermediate character goals (like needed items or researching new spells or just becoming more financially self-sufficient) to achieve, and the DM’s job is to weave all these disparate threads together to form some unexpected coherent whole.  Matt Mercer (of CR) and Griffin McElroy (of TAZ) are two of the best in the business at this, and it reminded me of the times that I had tried to achieve such things ... always with less success than these guys, of course.  But one of the benefits of getting old is that you can often look back and see where you went wrong in the past, and, between that and just learning from the examples that CR and TAZ were providing, I started to get excited to try it again—this time using my children as guinea pigs.

Now, as I talked about two installments ago, I had been mainly running pre-published adventures for my kids up to this point.  Premade adventures can be short, or they can be long, but either way they’re quite different than the long-form stories I’m talking about now.  They’re not customized to the characters of my players, and though the best DMs will certainly extend a published adventure to include such things, it’s never the same as a story that’s been built from the ground up to be about your characters.  For years, I had been thinking that all the prep work and the frustration wasn’t worth it; now, listening to The Adventure Zone and watching Critical Role, I was changing my mind.  I was seeing the benefits being reaped before my eyes (and ears), and I knew I couldn’t deprive my kids of that joy.  So it was that, while streaming D&D didn’t ignite my love of D&D, it did rekindle it.

I’ve already talked about my youngest bringing me her first idea for a D&D character, so I won’t rehash it here.  Corva Ravenstone was extremely animal focussed—a tiger for a guardian and a monkey as a constant companion—and my middle child always plays druids, because they think that shapeshifting is just the coolest thing ever.  When my eldest proposed a custom barbarian subclass whose “rage” was actually an uncontrolled transformation to a werewolf form,³ I knew that this campaign needed to be all about animals.  Always fascinated with the concept of a beastmaster-style character,⁴ I decided to dust off my attempts to create a class that could do this without breaking the action economy; my beastmaster class would end up being the basis for my eventual GMPC,⁵ and also provide the basis for Corva’s monkey companion.⁶  This echoes my very first experience playing D&D:⁷ making new rules so I didn’t have to say “no” to any part of a kid’s character concept ... it just happened to be my daughter instead of my brother in this case.

My middle child wanted to play a changeling, which is a race which can change its appearance at will.  (Yes, a changeling druid is basically doubling-down on the shapeshifting power—that’s what’s attractive for that particular kid.)  And, to up the transmutation factor even more, I gave them a custom magic item that allows them access to many of the coolest shapeshifting-related spells.  The problem was that changelings are from a world known as Eberron, and this campaign was definitely not going to take place on Eberron.  How did this changeling (whose name is Zyx) get from Eberron to the Forgotten Realms (the default setting for 5e)?  For that matter, my child decided to complicate my life even more when they saw and fell in love with the amazing dinosaurs of Ixalan, and decided that that was where Zyx learned druiding, so that they could turn into dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts.  Now I had a whole third world to work into the backstory.  But I took that on too.

My eldest, of course, has been playing D&D (and other TTRPGS, like Pathfinder) for years at this point, and is a GM in their own right.  I didn’t need to do much besides taking their custom barbarian subclass and making it a bit more polished.  But they also had an entirely new deity in their backstory, and I had to work that into the plot.  No problem.

Stealing Matt Mercer’s idea of one-shot adventures for the individual characters before the main story starts, I came up with the idea of “flashbackstories,” which were “flashbacks” (in the sense they took place 2 – 5 years before the main storyline starts) and also “backstories,” because they set up the plot.  See, instead of “you all meet in a pub,” I decided that there would be a mysterious benefactor (more of a “I suppose you’re wondering why I called all of you here today” situation).  Each character owed a big debt to this person.  But how did they become indebted to him?  Well, instead of just writing it out as a story, let’s play it out ... as a flashbackstory.  I wanted to give each character a guide: an NPC to help them out and introduce them to the man who would perform some valuable service for them in exchange for “a service to be provided at a later date.” I hit upon the idea of using my old characters for this purpose.  My old druid Sillarin would be an excellent guide for new druid Zyx.  Bowmaster and nature cleric Ellspeth was a natural fit for the young jungle girl (and archer) Corva.  As for burgeoning werewolf Isabella, who better to help her achieve calmness of mind and body than a monk?  So she ran into Jin.  Exactly as planned, each character had a chance to explore both personality and mechanics and feel things out.  The time gap also provided a perfect excuse for changing or evolving personality traits: your character just “grew up” a bit in the intervening years.

For the role of mysterious benefactor, I wanted someone colorful (both figuratively and literally), who seemed really out of place but also really in control.  I achieved this by inventing Hervé, a Vedalken rogue with the mastermind specialization.  Vedalken are an almost scifi race, originally from D&D’s sister game Magic: The Gathering.  They’ve been imported into D&D in two versions,⁸ and they have a feel almost like a cross between Spock and Data from Star Trek: obssessed with discovering new things, and for the most part coldly logical about everything else.  The mastermind is of course a fantastic subclass for a villain, but in this case it works well for someone who is basically a “finder” character: rich people hire him to find or obtain things for them, and he always know exactly the right combination of people (adventurers, specifically) to put together for a mission.  And he knows them because he’s “collected” them—basically, he wanders around bailing people with certain skills out of trouble so that they’ll owe him a favor when he finally runs across a job that could use their particular skills.  A character such as this is perfect for driving the “little” plot of a D&D campaign: he can be mysterious, and opaque with his motivations, or he can be open and offer lots of details to the characters, if he thinks it makes them more effective in doing jobs for him.  So he’s a mission generator and a font of information.  This is what you need to keep a campaign moving forward on a session-to-session basis.

For the bigger picture, though, you need a mystery to drive each character to search for something, and preferably a way to tie all the mysteries together into one big mystery.  Two of my characters (Corva and Zyx) gave me one of the best gifts you can give a DM: the gift of missing parents.  They might be dead ... or then again they might not.  Isabella’s story is more complicated: her father is the one who turned her into a werewolf in the first place, as part of some freaky cult thing.  Still, after reading a veritable shitload of old D&D lore, I came up with something that would satisfy all the backstories—even tying in the one for my own GMPC, Thurl—and also explain a bit of the world-hopping that Zyx apparently experienced at a young age into the bargain.  I won’t go into too much detail here (it’s rare that my kids read my blog, but better safe than sorry, I suppose), but it involves Planescape factions and secret societies (shades of both A Series of Unfortunate Events and Marvel’s Runaways) and, naturally, lots and lots of animals.  I call it the Family Campaign, both for the obvious reason, but also because there’s a deeper familial connection that will be revealed as time goes on.

And that brings us up to the present time.  Next time, in what may well be our last installment, I think I’ll talk about what D&D can mean in the context of learning, and of teaching.

__________

1 A one-shot is a very short adventure that’s designed to be run in a single session.  Although sometimes a one-shot might end up taking two sessions, in which case it’s really more of a two-shot.  But that’s more to do with the pace of the characters playing it than the adventure itself.

2 CR had 7 characters, so it was more practical to do them in groups of 2 or 3; for a more typical game of 3 or 4 characters, it would be perfectly fine to do proper solo adventures.

3 To be clear, this was before the Path of the Beast was a thing.  Although they’re quite similar, naturally.

4 You may remember that I went into some depth on that topic in part 4.

5 I still haven’t written my post on what this term means to me, but, for purposes of this discussion, let’s just say it’s a “full” member of the party—that is, not a henchman or a guide or a pet or a more experienced mentor type—who happens to be run by the GM instead of by a player.

6 If you remebered that Corva is a ranger, you may wonder why not just make her a beastmaster ranger and call it a day.  All I can tell you is, he’s not that sort of monkey.

7 Which we covered in part 2.

8 Specifically, in the Kaladesh Plane Shift supplement, and the official book Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, which represent the two different Magic worlds that feature them.

Isolation Report, Week #45

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, since our last isolation report, a lot has been going on, at least politically.  It’s difficult to know what to say about the events that have transpired here in the U.S. ... on the one hand, it seems completely predictable and expected.  On the other, that doesn’t keep it from being horrific.  Our only real saving grace here is that this attempted insurrection was being run by complete idiots.  Well-armed idiots, granted, but hardly brain giants.  Throughout the whole thing, I kept wondering to myself: what exactly do they think they’re going to accomplish?  Did they imagine that the entirety of the Congress was going to say “gee, people ran us out of the place we normally meet; I guess we can’t do anything now! may as well go home”?  Some Congressperson tweeted that we were lucky that one of the staffers got the official electoral college ballots before the rioters could destroy them ... but so what if they had?  Would that really have stopped the election from progressing?  Our entire government would have just thrown up their hands and said “oh, well, I suppose Trump will just have to be President forever now.” Sure, that makes sense.

So, they caused a lot of chaos, and, sadly, some people died (on both sides).  But I just can’t believe it was ever going to change anything in the long run, or accomplish any of their actual goals.  Assuming they had goals.  Aren’t these the same people who were sitting at home and laughing at the Occupy Wall Street movement for not knowing what they wanted?  But it seems to me that this was the same thing.  Except the Occupy-Wall-Street-ers never killed anyone.  I hope that wasn’t their goal.  That would be sad, and scary, and even more disturbing than it already is.  But somehow I don’t think that was ever the point.  They just listened to Trump, and Giuliani (“trial by comat!”), and the other morons, and they decided to go fuck some shit up, without any real goals or concrete ideas of how it was going to end up.  Certainly if they had planned a little better, they wouldn’t have managed to all end up on camera, faces exposed, and easily identifiable by the authorities.

But it happened, and we have to deal with it, and we’re still all locked down and not really able to go anywhere or do anything.  A friend told me that one of their relatives who works at a local hospital says they’re putting patients in the gift shop at this point.  Admittedly, you’re hearing this third-hand, so feel free to discount it as an unreliable source, but if you live in the U.S. I bet you’re awre of similar conditions where you live.  Things are getting worse, and we still have to wait another week or so before it can even start to get better.

Of course, the House has impeached Trump, again—no surprise there—and many people on television are expressing dismay that the Senate won’t vote to convict before Trump is already out of office.  I’m not stressed on that point.  Sure, he’ll no doubt do plenty more damage on the way out, but I think the important part is that he does get convicted, and that’s more likely to happen with the new Senate than the old one.  Why is it important to convict him after he’s already out of office?  Well, first of all, it’s important to send that message to any future idiots who find themselves in Trump’s position.  But I think it’s just as important that Trump not be allowed to run for office again (as some people in the media have pointed out), and that he not be allowed to reap the benefits normally afforded to ex-Presidents (as apparently no one has thought to mention yet).  A retired President continues to collect a stipend for life, plus the Secret Service protective detail, which we already know that Trump views as a money-making venture.  So I really don’t want my tax money going to support that sort of bullshit for however more years he manages to cling to life.  And, in my experience, only the good die young: true assholes can live for-fucking-ever.

I don’t know.  I guess we’ll have to see how it all shakes out.  Hopefully there won’t be any more violence, and hopefully the new administration will restore some sanity.  But I honestly don’t know.  I’m just waiting to find out like all the rest of you.