It’s cold outside right now (12° up from -6° earlier today), but look at the forecast for Wednesday.

This is Vladivostok cold; battery-freezing cold.

Yikes.

TV ornament from Jade – a former co-worker

As just about every TV reviewer has noted at some point in the past few years, this is “peak TV” or “TV’s Golden Age” (or something similar).

Riding on the rising tide of cable with non-network offerings such as HBO and Showtime, the amount of quality television has accelerated with the streaming services – Netflix, Amazon Prime, HULU, CBS Direct – offering original content of their own. And more often than not, this original content actually is original – not another Law and Order knockoff or a stale sitcom. Think Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and Veep (The West Wing is what [liberals] want politics to be like; Veep is probably closer to reality. *shudder*).

Over the past few weeks, I read many “best of 2018” articles (books, movies, TV etc.), and one thing most TV critics had in common was a list of shows they hadn’t kept up with (season 7 of a long running show) or just hadn’t around to even starting (usually for a show in it’s first or second season). In most cases, the shows listed could be seen on other reviewers’ Top 10 lists – TV shows are so expansive yet impressive that those who get paid to watch TV couldn’t get around to watching highly regarded shows.

Says something.

Now, I like binging on TV shows – I have a lot of DVD seasons and I currently stream off Amazon Prime. And our library, Mount Prospect, IL, has a pretty good collection of DVDs to rent, both movies and TV shows (I burned through all of Boston Legal from library rentals a year or so ago).

Over this period, I have watched some magnificent TV – Mad Men, The Americans (I still haven’t finished this), and the afore-mentioned Veep.

However, I wan to focus on a few shows that I keep coming back to, watching over and over. For the most part they are just “OK” fare, and I could see someone not liking them.

In no particular order:

• Friends – Yes, lightweight but so popular. Some seasons/show arcs are better than others, but good clean fun. Hey, Netflix just ponied up $100 million to keep it for another year; it’s not just me watching…
• Monk – Tony Shaloub as an obsessive compulsive brilliant former San Francisco detective. There is an arc to the show – the one case he cannot solve is who killed his journalist wife – but each show is self-contained with a Colombo-like ending: “Here’s what happened…” Good cast of characters surround him that play (mainly) straight to his neurotic self, yet have quirks of their own. No life lessons or great art; just crime solving with brains instead of guns.
• White Collar – Premise: Master forger/thief/con man is let out of jail (on an ankle tracker) to help FBI find and arrest criminals…like him. Some good supporting characters, especially Mozzie (Willie Garson), and – like Monk – just fun, intellectual crime-solving. Downside: There’s some really bad acting in this show, in my opinion.
• Covert Affairs – Premise: Sexy (Piper Perabo; not really my type) Army brat who has great language skills joins the CIA in DC and becomes a covert agent. Lots of spy vs. spy hi-jinks. Fun, and set (maybe not shot) in locales around the world, from Italy to Thailand to Mexico.
• Suits – Premise: Brilliant, photographic memory guy who is not a lawyer hired by hotshot lawyer to work at his firm as a lawyer – with the full knowledge that he’s a fraud. The first few seasons were the best; Meghan Markle left the show to become UK royalty, and her brainiac husband left at the same time. From what I’ve read, the show went off a cliff after that. This show is a mixed bag; I didn’t purchase it, just rented from the library. I liked the shows where there were interesting cases and how they were resolved; there was too much of an emphasis at times of office politics/mergers etc. for my taste.
• Castle – Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a rich and famous mystery writer (think Michael Connelly or James Patterson – both of whom appear in the show as themselves, at a periodic poker game). Stanford graduate (smart) and beautiful NYC homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) notices similarities between her crime scene and a Castle book murder and asks for his input. Castle is both smitten by Beckett and real-life crime solving, and they become partners of sorts. Some goofy supporting characters, especially the other detectives. Like Monk, there is an arc around a murder (Beckett’s lawyer mother), but it’s more clunky than interesting.
• Burn Notice – CIA spy burned and returns home (Miami, FL) where, with the help of an old girlfriend (ex-IRA gunrunner) and old friend Sam, an ex-Navy Seal, he tries to figure out who burned him. Along the way – and this is the fun part – the trio use their spy/commando skills to help regular people who were scammed, getting threatened and so on. For some reason, they fire weapons, have high-speed car chases and blow up (stuff) more often than Bobby Knight did with a near-sighted ref, yet they never get arrested. And the Burn Notice guy has a great car – and old Dodge Charger – that has been blown up, hit, had stuff crush it, shot at countless times. It should look like a pile of metal shavings. But it keeps coming back, the paint on the car glistening like polished obsidian. Hey – it’s a TV show! Sharon Gless plays the Burn Notice’s chain-smoking mom, and she is great. And gets better as the show goes on.

That’s the bulk of my favorite binges, at least the ones I can recall right now.

The novel

HULU – Season One

I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale shortly after the novel’s release in 1985; it was probably a year later, when the paperback version came out.

Now, I’ve read a lot of great modern novels since that time – Jane Hamilton’s A Map fo the World, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Dan DeLillo’s White Noise and many others I could name if I just scanned a few of my bookcases.

But Atwood’s dystopian novel struck me at the time, and to this day, as something different – it has more in common with Viginia Woolf and Syvia Plath (and – of course – George Orwell) than Hamilton and the others.

The Handmaid’s Tale is on a different level, a timeless almost classic.

I’ll be honest, I don’t recall a lot about the book today (I read it more than thirty years ago); I don’t even recall if it ended on a hopeful or discordant note. I really don’t. But I remember that it really chilled me, the precise, sparse writing, and the description of a autocratic, evil world that was – sadly – believable.

Which brings me to the TV version of the novel, the first season of which I watched this weekend: Season Two is already out on DVD (and I’ve purchased same), but I kept holding off on watching, simply because the book was so good, and the praise for the HULU series made it seem like nothing could live up to the book/TV hype.

Well, I was wrong. The show is dark, disturbing, brilliantly cast and performed. Elisabeth Moss – Offred (Of Fred, whom she is the handmaiden to) – is brilliant. From Zoey Bartlet through Peggy Olson to Offred, Moss has really left her mark on the small screen.

The flashbacks are, to me, the most fascinating part of the show: How we got here. From a democracy to a totalitarian society where we keep fertile women for the elite to rape and impregnate, as most women have become infertile due to seemingly decades of pollution and corporations having five-week plans ($$), not five-year visions.

It’s troubling because it shows how this happens – just one small slip, and then another…rinse and repeat. That’s how Gilead (the fictional area [state? city? Unclear.]) changed.

And it’s troubling because of how the last couple of years the US has, little by little, been showing our country’s bad side (pulling out of treaties, xenophobia, child separation at the southern border, hate crimes and speech, approval of authoritarian leaders and governments, and so much more). Could Gilead happen here?

I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn’t learned that it can happen so gradually you don’t lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don’t necessarily sense the motion. I’ve found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.

— Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World (first graph)

Yes, Gilead could happen here – very much a long shot with all our checks and balances, but you never know…and never say “never.”

All in all, very well done. I just (re-)read the first four or so pages of the book, and they are dark – I’m guessing it’s a case of the book besting the movie/TV show. Might have to read it again.

All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Source: Anna Karenina (first sentence)

How do different families handle marriage/sickness/death?

Do they differ?

My guess is each in its own way…

Bookcase with NO deletes

For whatever reason, I’ve been on a bit of a cleaning bender as of late – An Autumn Cleaning – in my home office (books, computers, stereo, plants, and pics on the wall).

Which is long overdue.

As part of this cleanse, I’ve been getting rid of a bunch of books – tossing and giving away.

The books I’m shedding primarily fall into one of three categories:

• Computer books: I’ve purchased – and used – a lot of computer books in my day. I first got into computers, beyond HS/college programming classes, in the mid-90s, as the internet (pre-web) was becoming available. But today, well, there’s this thing called the InterToobs, and it’s like a book of everything, with a really great index. Some computer books seem to be worth hanging onto (solid book back in the day), why would a book on Visual Basic v5 be worth hanging onto if Visual Basic is now way past v6? Sentimental reasons only, and I have hung onto a bunch of computer books for sentimental reasons. Additionally, there are comp books (Learning Perl, 2nd edition, forward by by Larry Wall) that I know so well that they sometimes beat a web search. Rare, but a handful (the O’Reilly/animal books predominate) are useful analog references to this day. NOTE: I have documented and recycled these books. Nice to see what I had (just for fun), but no on would really want these.
• Reference books: As with computer books, in the age of the internet, reference books are somewhat dated. Does anyone really need decades-old AP style manuals, or a 1993 or 1996 World Almanac? Didn’t think so. NOTE: I have documented and recycled these books. Nice to see what I had (just for fun), but no on would really want these.
• Everything else: I haven’t documented these, as who really needs a picture of a paperback version (or two) of The World According to Garp? These are books that I’ll try to give away, because others may want them: Poetry collections, novels, short story collections. Also non-fiction tomes about model railroading (I was a fan) and other books on history/geography that seemed interesting at the time, but no longer (for me – but maybe book gold to someone else).

  A lot of the fiction I’m giving away are titles of which, for whatever reason, I have multiple copies. For example: I have multiple copies of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim – part of paperback collection of Conrad’s works, a solo soft cover, and a Modern Library hard cover (I kept the latter). What can I say? I’ve been a bit of a book whore since my early teens and I’m not getting any younger…

Where does this leave me?

Well, I still have way more books than the average bear. Once I finish this particular purge and have my shelves organized (as well as they will ever be), the impression my office will leave on folks is: Lots of computer equipment, a crapload of books.

And they would not be wrong. (Refer back to my book whore comment.)

And I have not – and will not – touch my photo book collection. Well, there are a couple that might go, but I’m happy with my photo books (and that bookcase of stuff is in the living room, not part of the office clutter).

I will always have too many books.

He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last

— Wallace Stevens

Last Friday – Sept. 14, 2018 – Romy and I once again ventured into Chicago for a day of just goofing off.

I hope to post some pictures shortly, but – in the meantime – some thoughts on what we saw and did.

Anyway, we took the train into the Loop and then set out on our Chicago Adventure.

Beautiful day – clear and low 80s, Nice.

• Elephand & Castle: We hit the one on Adams (just east of the Rookery), as it was about 8;30am, and the one on Wells doesn’t open until 11am or so. Surprisingly busy this time over the other times we had been there.
• Riverwalk: By this, I mean the relatively new river walk on the south side of the Chicago River from roughly Franklin to Lake Shore Drive. we only went as far as Michigan Avenue, but they really did a nice job on this. Lot’s of plantings, restaurants, small jettys so you could get out of the moving crowd and just watch the boats go by. We went on the Riverwalk later (going the other way), around noon or so, and th restaurants there were packed. It was Friday, and it was a nice day, but good to see that these places are making a go of it. Well done, Chicago!
• Apple store in Pioneer Plaza: I’ve read a bit about this in The Chicago Tribune and online, but I found the space to be somewhat of a let-down. The expansive views of the river and the tiered seating was nice, but maybe the high sealing (you enter from the plaza – high above the river – and walk down to the store, which is at the river’s edge). The one we went to in Portland, OR, was – to me – more “applee.” Don’t get me wrong – nice store and all, but I guess I had high expectations that were not met.
• Art Institute of Chicago: Going to the Art Institute was basically our excuse for taking a day off and hitting downtown – the John Singer Sargent exhibit was getting close to closing, and we wanted to see it. It was nice, especially his portraits: lush & classy. I was more stuck by some of his work that I had not seen, such as an orchestra rehearsal that reflected Impressionistic/Cubist influences. And he had some nice watercolors of architectural scenes (mainly in Florida) that I could see hanging in our house.
• Art Institute Deux: We also saw a photo exhibit that focused on Chicago photography (taken in Chicago, primarily South Chicago). Outside of some Gordon Parks photos (related to some Life magazine assignments, some published, some not) it was a generally weak exhibit. I’m glad we took the time to see it, but I wouldn’t have kicked myself if we have missed it.
• Millennium Park: As is the law, we had to wander around Millennium Park and – as strictly enforced by the tourist police – we had to take pictures of The Bean (Cloudscape). The Bean is probably the most photographed place/object in Chicago. I can’t even think of what would come next: The Wrigley Building? Wrigley Field (if one gets up that way)? Like The Riverwalk, Millennium Park is a real gem. It seemed to take forever to get built, but now that it’s there (and mostly done), I have to again give a round of applause to the city: The Bean, the Frank Gehry-designed pavilion, the abundant planting, the restaurants, the bridges over Columbus (to Maggie Daley kids park) and to the Art Institute. Well, that’s a lot jammed into one place – but it doesn’t feel jammed. And it’s right downtown, next to the Art Institute, and it’s free.
• Lunch time!: We had decided on eating at Shaw’s Crabhouse – we just can’t seem to get decent (or a wide variety) of seafood up by us. Turned out to be an excellent choice. Shaw’s is, as Romy put it, “an adult restaurant.” It was a nice change, and excellent food.

After lunch, we hit the Riverwalk again to head back to the train station – we went a bit further west on it than we had earlier in the day. There was a stretch were there were just a bunch of brightly colored Adirondack chairs on a grassy slope, just facing the river about where it divides into the North and South Chicago rivers. I don’t know if you rent the chairs or what (didn’t appear to be any place to pay…). But people were just sitting there, reading, eating lunch or just soaking up sun.

We grabbed a beer while waiting for the train (tasted good; we did a fair amount of walking and it was ~ 80 degrees with no clouds) and then headed home.

We should do this more often!

Pic from amazon.com

I’ve been late to a lot of the tech parties – I thought eBay was ridiculous (wrong!); I still don’t tweet … but whatever.

I have not resisted streaming services for video – I just didn’t need same. I purchased DVDs (physical media – how Old School!) or rented same.

I didn’t need Netflix etc.

But – last month – as part of a larger Amazon.com “Stuff on Sale buy stuff you don’t even need” campaign (the so-called Prime Day), the basic Fire Stick was on sale.

For $20.

I have Amazon Prime – which has a lot of free content (TV & movie); let’s give it a whirl.

It’s been remarkable. Streaming is, as late to the party dude will attest, the future.

The upsides to streaming are sorta obvious – pick stuff, play/pause and so on. (Note: Romy “discovered” a TV series in the Fire Stick that she is watching. So I have to add to “sorta obvious” streaming pluses are … well, discovery.)

Streaming downsides are more complicated:

• You get what they have. What if you missed what rolled off yesterday? Didn’t see the end of the movie; the last episode of TV show X?
• Sure, the selection is large, so if you wanted X, there is always Y and Z. What’s the diff? Is this good or bad?
• But what if you really wanted to watch Casablanca? I have the physical disc; streaming service might not have same.
• Yes, what I really need is another black remote…

Streaming – like all tech – is give and take.

But streaming is better than I imagined….

And Amazon did a brilliant ($$-focused) job of providing a way to easily stream (Hardware: FireStick; Content: Prime Video) and make dolts like me sing its praises.

To paraphrase the Aerosmith song Dream On: Stream on / Stream on…

Update 9/9/2018 – Bought a new bedroom TV; it has Amazon Prime built in. Still awesome, but the TV doesn’t have the Fire’s voice remote capabilities. Not the end of the world, but the voice remote is better (to me) than having to (via screen keyboard) keying in same. I’m still a little skeptical about voice activated systems (touted for, for example, MS Word/email constructs – nah, not soon), but works for home remotes/Alexa etc. Soon, it’ll be hard to buy an electronic device without voice control – like how you can’t buy a car without an insane (AM/1233333 FM channels/phone/cd/device connectivity etc) radio (is that still a “radio” or a “communications port”?)

I could be wrong.

But I’m not.

Long story, but the bullet points:

• I used to be professional photographer.
• I am a web dork.
• Backi in 2011(ish), when I was job hunting, I said that I thought “big data” (AI) and geo-location were the two big trends in computing – and that I had little knowledge of either but that’s what I was interested in (job-wise). (Note: I was correct, but I totally whiffed on the the other two trends – mobile and devices/”internet of things” [IoT].)
• My “professional” cameras .- Canon 10 D and Canon 50 D – don’t have lat/lon data. My iPhone (4s) does, but not used that much.
• I have built tools for my own gallery, but the tools ignore lat/lon etc even when available (iPhone).

So I got a bug up my butt to add lat/lon/altitude to my pics – both for the data, and as a self-imposed “project” where I’d once again work with the Google Maps API.

I had worked with the Maps API years ago – I built a zip code based store locator for a site (since replaced), and it was fun. And the Maps API has changed since I had last worked with it, so I was looking forward to “getting my hands dirty” with the API.

So here’s what I did:

3) Using the Google maps API, built a tool where I could click on the map and get the lat, lon and altitude of that pin drop – and add that data to the lat_lon table, including a description (IL – Chicago Art Institute). That way, in my image add/edit tools, I can use those stored lat/lons as jumping-off points to other locations.

4) In my image add/edit tools, use a modified Google Map (from #3) to help geo-locate. From the pulldown what I populated with the tool in #3, I select something near where the picture is, and move the map and click in the exact location. It’ll pre-prepopulate the lat, lon and altitude for that image.

With both batch processing (update all Chicago Art Institute pics with x, y and z…..) and doing the one-offs, I now have ALL my pics in the gallery geo-coded: Some extremely accurately, some close enuf.

5) Finally, in the user-facing gallery, I added a “Map” button to the image-display screen. This will appear if the image has geo-code info. Click the button, and a Google map with a pin denoting location will appear (below the map is the altitude).

NOTE: This is not available on my more public CGI gallery; it’s a test gallery, database driven (PHP/mySQL).

It was a fun project, and I just finished putting in a search box in the map tools I built (NOT reflected in the screen-grabs). Pretty cool – and I missed this when I was geo-coding. I had to have a Google Map open to search and then find on my tools. A little clunky, but moving forward that won’t be an issue.

Next step – fix my “add an image” tool to recognize if an image has geo–coordinates and use them (i.e. an iPhone pic) It’s just a matter of extracting the EXIF data, and – in PHP – that’s pretty easy.

Each camera has its own EXIF format, however, so that’s a pain (standards people!).

READING:
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is an important book.

An epistolary non-fiction book, Coates writes to his son about what it was to grow up as a black person in West Baltimore, MD and beyond.

As a white person of certain privilege (white, male, not poor) it hit hard. It comes in the middle of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) protest movement, and the constant stream of news that is “…if he/she wasn’t black…” news.

Coates is way smarter than me; he is also resentful of me (white, Ivy League), but balanced.

This book is – to totally trivialize it – the book equivalent of 12 Years a Slave. A slap in the face of what being black in America is. A reality check.

The movie focused on pre-Civil War norms; this book focuses on the post Civil Rights America, and how that has … improved, but not at all fixed the life of the average black American.

Sigh.

All books

Yes, ater reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, I wrote my mini-review of the book — see sidebar, or see all Top [more than] 10 Lists (everyone loves lists!).

But this book – to me – resonated more than the simple review reflected.

It’s an important book.

Why?

Because Coates outlines, in painful – but not hyperbolic – detail what it is like to grow up black.

Specifically, West Baltimore, MD, in the 70s and 80s (Coates was born in 1975). A decade after The March on Washington.

It’s not pretty, especially since we are – today – 150 years beyond the Civil War; 50 years beyond the march on Washington.

Black individuals – Freddie Grey, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland – that were pulled over/choked/shot because, it seems, they were black.

They were judged, not by the content of their character, but by the color of their skin.

The Trump campaign/presidency has, basically, allowed racists to speak up. It’s done this by the candidate/president regularly using xenophobic, misogynist and – at best – borderline racist comments. If the president can say this, so can we, right?

I’m not saying Trump caused the uptick in, well, basically hateful language (and some actions, such as mosque bombings), but he created an environment in which is was OK to say things we wouldn’t have said out loud before. And this shows how far we have not come.

Maybe this unmasking, this “laying the cards on the table” is a good thing, as we’re not pretending to just all get along anymore, but it’s – to me – damn frightening to see/hear/read.

I’m reading a new book of essays by Teju Cole – I read a review of him about a year or so ago. Bought the book; reading same.

Book: Known and Strange Things; essay “Black Body”

The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless forms of disregard. There is a vivid performance of innocence, but there’s no actual innocence left. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can’t even get started on the question of reparations.

Can agree to disagree, but what Cole spells out is what Coates spells out, to a different degree – but both agree that to be black in America is an extra burden that you would NOT have if you were not black.

Again, 150 years after the Civil War, I agree.

And while that makes me mad (oh, enlightened white dude!), it still keeps “[verb -driving|walking|ordering fast food|etc] while black” individuals in the US at risk, and I really don’t know what to do about that.

Among his other (more significant) actions, his book A Brief History of Time was the successor to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Science for the masses. He died yesterday (3/14/2018), sad, but he received his ALS diagnosis in his twenties (received a grim “a handful of years to live” talk, but lived 50 years beyond that).

I liked the math in his famous book (that math that I could follow); this was a complaint of many readers of the book (“too much math!”).

With his compromised (physical) condition, he still figgered out so much about the cosmos – specifically, the nature of black holes.

Einstein vs. Newton vs. Hawking??

No good answer, but that they are all put together…..says something.