Barkerburgh

I was always a big Inspector Morse fan, both the books and the series, and was sad when all ended as all human things must end.

Now, Kevin Whateley, who played Endeavour Morse’s faithful sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, has returned to PBS’ Masterpiece as Inspector Lewis, and is welcome. There was one episode (as far as I know) a few years ago, but with last night’s episode and next week’s promised one, there are least two more. The ads for DVDs during the show suggest there’s an entire series; whether PBS will carry it all, I don’t know yet.

Seven words you won’t be able to say on TV anymore.

I will always laugh about Cardinal Glick.
Read the rest of this entry »

So I tried to watch Oliver Stone’s Alexander the other night. There was so much about it I wanted to like, and so much that was good about it, but what a synergetic suckfest. Almost as bad as Star Trek:Enterprise.

Colin Farrell was good, surprisingly. Angelina Jolie as Olympias was good, even with the 1960s “Mission:Impossible” generic Eastern European accent. Rosario Dawson was achingly beautiful as Roxane. Stone even handled the gay thing between Alexander and Hephaistion better than I expected. The battle scenes were glorious and splendid, and just what you want battle re-creations to look and sound like. If Stone had had Smell-o-Vision(tm) - which the Japanese have been working on for 30 years - the battle scenes would have been perfect.

But you know that really burned my ass? Read the rest of this entry »

(Does anybody else empathize with how hard it is to use the correct HTML spelling for ‘center’ when you’re Canadian?)

I’m just sayin’.

And if you could too, that would be great.

Visit Chez PLJ

I just discovered that Buffalo’s PBS station, WNED, broadcast 17, cable 61 (Rogers, downtown) is rerunning The Vicar of Dibley and the exquisite mid-1980s Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett in the title role.

Dawn French is almost flawless in The V of D, (en passant, closing credits include “Dawn French supplied by: Saunders and French Productions”) and Jeremy Brett is the best Sherlock Holmes ever. Ever.

There’s this cool show on Canada’s History Channel called “Cities of the Underworld“. It’s on Friday nights at 8:00pm, and repeated during the week.

The current host is an enthusiastic amateur name Dan Wildman, who keeps up a level of excitement as he crawls through 2,000 year old sewers or hangs in a sling over a 10 storey deep tufa mine.

Aimed at the armchair archaeologist or crypto-historian, it’s all about the simple fact that any city that’s old enough has layers. Sometimes those layers are caves or quarry-caverns, or once ground-level ruins that serve as the base or foundation for more recent or modern structures like churches or even just apartment buildings, whose tenants may know nothing about what exists only a few metres below their building. In Rome there’s Maecenas’ villa. In Naples there’s underground tufa quarries dating back to the city’s founding as a Greek colony (They’re not called Neapolitans fer nuthin’, ya know.) In Paris there’s ancient sewers. There’s tombs and cisterns, graves and catacombs, cult sites and strange (sometimes really strange) ossuaries.

And it’s not just ancient history. There’s subways and bomb shelters, secret labs and secret lairs, access tunnels and escape routes. Cool stuff often unknown today, and inaccessible to everyday tourists.

Lotsa, lotsa fun. It’s even got an IMDB entry, with discussions.

Leslie and Peter (and Simon)  invited me to join them for a Sunday afternoon on the Oak Ridges Moraine at the former Koffler estate known as Jokers Hill, now a U of T biological reserve.  It was a horse farm once and the outbuildings still stand.  There’s an overgrown race-track overlooking the Holland Marsh on one side of Dufferin and hectares and hectares of beautiful forest on the other

As you all probably know, Peter is an Indiana Jones biologist, (the Tibetan Plateau, the California coast, Western Australia…but just let him loose in Pellucidar or on Skull Island) and he’s worked a lot at Jokers Hill so he knows the ecology and biodiversity of the area.  And where to find newts, one of which Simon found fascinating.

(I have a picture of the newt he found that Wordpress won’t let me upload…)

What I got was an amazing natural history tour of the area, from the bedrock up, the moraine being about 100 metres of glacial sediment topped with that beautiful forest.

The day was warm but neither hot nor humid.  There was a light breeze even in the forest and, lots of sand.

We saw many patches of white trilliums ranging from one or two in number to a dozen or fifteen or more.  There were several lone red trilliums, patches of different kinds of violets, of little blue wildflowers, of yellow ones, a patch of dog-tooth violets (leaves only, no flowers) in a shaft of sunlight, small streams, swampy seeps, a lovely stand of quaking aspens demonstrating the reason for their name in a mild breeze, the scent of sun-warmed hay off a small feral meadow, a low stone wall made from glacial erratic boulders (probably from back in the olden days when settlers tried to farm the moraine), an old-fashioned stubby beer bottle which I snagged, many cool rocks which Simon found and carried around until we found a pond or a stream, and only one (that I noticed) patch of good old jack-in-the-pulpits, one of my favourites when I was a kid in Georgetown nearly forty years ago.

We must have walked about fifty kilometers - or like three or four

We had a nice French farmyard lunch of baguettes, cheeses, sausage, pate, oranges, and water - not local, from a water-cooler

When I got home, I napped like crazy.
 

The A&E Andromeda Strain Remake

If nothing else, it’s got a good cast. Updated, it nevertheless follows the general storyline of the original movie and book (which I think stands up better than a lot of science adventures from the same era), and of course, there’s iPhones and cellphones and references to WMDs, North Korea and Homeland Security (how 1984 / Brave New World / THX1138 / Sleeper is that name anyway?).

You probably know that the action starts in the isolated Utah town of Piedmont, where townspeople find a recently fallen satellite and take it to the firehall, where they open it, exposing the entire town to an immediately deadly pathogen, killing almost everyone. Soon there are vultures.

What got me was a Ford commercial about 20 minutes in during the first episode. A couple is driving a Ford vehicle through a town identified on-screen as Piedmont. They see a vulture right beside them and they hightail it outa Dodge (Piedmont). Struck me as real tasteless.

& Et Cetera.1

There’s this Cialis commercial with a bathtub overflowing, a turkey burning in the oven, a dog scratching to be let out and a lawn sprinkler flooding the front yard. There’s a nice little Spanish ditty playing as we see all this.

The husband and wife run around and turn off water and save the turkey, but don’t let the dog out.

Since they’ve been off carpe dieming thanks to Cialis, shouldn’t they have first turned off the sprinkler and the bath, and turned the oven down? Or is Cialis just that compelling?

And it’s just plain irresponsible not to have let the dog out first.

& Et Cetera.2

Egad! CBC will be carrying Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune in the fall. Rest easy, all, though. Coronation Street is safe.