Sunday!
As a cat owner, you regularly make little discoveries such as “the thing you thought was just trash is actually THE BEST CAT TOY IN THE WORLD”.
We have discovered, for example, the little cardboard zip that you get on the side of frozen pizza boxes (such as Paul Neuman’s pizza) is THE BEST CAT TOY IN THE WORLD. Seriously, Tiger hears that noise from anywhere in the house and he comes running and if he happens to already be there, it’s fun to watch his pupils turn from slits to saucers in about a second when he sees that silly little piece of paper.
Except, of course, when he throws it in the air and pounces on it on the bed in which you happen to be sleeping at 5AM on your first day to sleep in in a long, long time. Then it’s less charming.
This last week has seen me STUCK IN THE LAB and, as such, when I get home I don’t have the energy for much more than making a frozen pizza and then crashing in front of a game system. BUT! I do have Pacific Rim scheduled for tonight.
So… what have you been reading, watching, and/or being awoken by the cats with?
I’m reading an anthology of Stanley Hauerwas’s writings. True to form, I’ll probably read only a couple selections (I tend not to finish a lot of what I read). But I’ve been interested in him for quite a while and thought I might give him a try.Report
Oh, I’ve been waiting for this post, because I want to complain. So, on Thursday I get this email saying that the 5th season of Fringe is now streaming. Yay! I’d just about run out of new stuff to watch, and the new episodes of a bunch of my shows (Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, Psych, etc.) are not showing up on Netflix streaming when they usually do (July), for one reason or another. So I watched an episode on Thursday night, and then a couple on Friday night, and then I woke up Saturday thinking, “Girlfriend’s in Nueva York, son’s at his mom’s; I have nothing to do, so I’ll watch some Fringe today.” But then I log into Netflix, and the little “New Episodes” band at the bottom of the Fringe icon is gone. And when I go into Fringe, it only has 4 seasons. What.. the… hell?! Turns out, Netflix added season 5 before they were contractually able to do so, and the email they sent me yesterday says that season 5 will be available September… September 12. Argh! (FWP)
But they did add the last season of Breaking Bad, so… I am watching Breaking Bad. And reading more Max Frisch, for nostalgia purposes.Report
(sharp intake) then maybe that means that the box set is available!!!!Report
Gobbled up the entire House of Cards series on Netflix. Trying to read up on the situation in the Middle East.
One of the cats is sleeping in the Bissinger’s Handcrafted Chocolates box beside my monitor, a needy creature whose capacity for petting is seemingly endless. Don’t get me started on the Things that go Bump in the Night chez Blaise: all three cats come to life when the lights go off.
The husky dog’s hamburger detector has gone off and she is now doing her Ethiopian Dog impression. Sleepy Sunday morning after a longish drive down back roads yesterday, attending a housewarming for a client.
Working through a compendium of Android example code, exploring parts of the API I haven’t run across before. Put in an old computer to stream justin.tv Dr. Who shows. A few hours cleaning the basement lie in my immediate future.Report
Last night, I went to see Hannah Arendt solo. Surprisingly it is difficult to get people to go see movies about mid-century German-Jewish political theorists who were BFFs with Mary McCarthy (insert obligatory Vassar shout-out here).
The movie was decent but not amazing. A pretty standard biopic in Academy Award winning mode. It was interesting that they largely used documentary footage of the Eichmann trial instead of reenactment (this was probably cheaper). I wish they cast Wallace Shawn as his dad, the legendary New Yorker editor Bill Shawn. The movie was largely on her side even though most current historians think she wrote interesting philosophy but shoddy history. Some also think she was unconsciously influenced by typical German-Jewish disdain for Eastern European Jews.
It might encourage me to reread Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism though.
I am still going through Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton. Will start on What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank after that.Report
I’ve been looking forward to this, though I probably won’t see it until it’s on DVD. She was a big influence on my thinking when I was younger. Glad it’s not terrible. Did it have Heid.egger in it?Report
I haven’t heard of this movie (I’m not exactly the first to hear of movies), but as Chris said, I’ll try to see it on DVD when it comes out.Report
Who can read at a time like this? What, with the promise of monkey-ponies coming from the LAB any day now! Ordinary times indeed.Report
Sadly, I was transferred away from that lab. I’m in the one that needs a tech refresh before it’s good for more than holding papers down.Report
Oh, well, yes, that’s, um, exciting as well.
(Goes back to reading Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites… dreams of pony-monkies dashed, but not forgotten, not quite.).Report
I’d bogged down on the new season of Arrested Development about halfway through. It wasn’t as funny as I’d remembered the show being, and the choice to focus on one character per episode, rather than use the whole ensemble, didn’t work well. (It was forced by the unavailability of the actors.) Last night I thought “What the heck, let’s give it another chance” and watched the first two episodes again, and they were really funny.Report
Yeah, I only made it to about ep. 5. But multiple people have told me it picks up steam after that.
Finished the rest of Bowling Alone Friday night, picked up G. Edward White’s The Constitution and the New Deal yesterday. Had started reading that a year and a half ago but put it down and then lost the book, only to have finally resurfaced when unpacking from our move (it had been boxed and sent to storage). It’s interesting but written by an academic, meaning the prose is purposefully dry and impenetrable. The academy’s secret handshake. I couldn’t remember anything about the first hundred pages so I started over, taking notes this time. Then decided it’d been too long since reading any fiction so Kindle-sampled Tom Wolfe’s latest. I love his prose, but I don’t know if I can commit to a 700 page novel right now. All I really need is a non-fiction palate cleanse. Maybe I’ll pick up a Bertie Wooster instead.Report
If you haven’t already read it, try The Code of the Woosters. It’s not only hilarious, but constructed like a Swiss watch. Or you could download Right Ho, Jeeves free from gutenberg.org. (It shouldn’t be there, since it was published in 1932, but apparently some edition mistakenly says 1922, and the Wodehouse estate never sent them a takedown notice.)Report
Thanks, Mike. I’ll give those a try.Report
I am within striking distance of finishing Atlas Shrugged. Rearden’s production is about to be seized (I assume). I know I am supposed to get a feeling of comeuppance for what is happening to the country, but I mostly feel sad. (No politics. No religion.)Report
I think Tim has the right idea here. When you’re done with it, read some Wodehouse to cheer up.Report
I am also reading Project Superpowers. I had debated long and hard as to whether or not to read it, because I intend to use a number of the characters that are used in this series for a future product. A part of me thinks “The less I know about what they’re doing with them, the better.” But then by reading it, I also know what to avoid. Turns out, there isn’t much overlap so I have little to worry about other than trademarks.
On the whole, it’s interesting but relatively shallow. So many characters, so little time devoted to them. Lots of fighting, though.Report
I have it S1 and most of the spin offs unread in my comic drawer. Based on your review, I may get to it but I won’t be moving it up on the priority list.Report
I’m consistently waked by the cat walking over my body or above my head on the pillow. She either wants love or food, or both.
IIRC the best cat toy i’ve found is jute twine with a twist tie on the end or maybe a packing peanut.
I enjoyed watching “She’s all that” (yeah, got a thing for Rachel Leigh Cook) Ronin, Diners Drive Inns & Dives, LOTR, and a few others.Report
Still reading War and Peace. That will probably be the case for the next few weeks, unless I take a lazy day to do nothing but read.
Spent a little bit of time reading Judge Dredd Casefiles #1, which collects his early appearances. That also ties into my movies choice for this weekend “Dredd.” I really do not think a Judge Dredd movie could have been done much better than that.
I have also been making my way through Series 7 of Doctor Who. The newest companion has joined him on his travels. I have been watching it almost exclusively, and I will probably finish it this week.Report
There have been rumors of a Dredd sequel. If they can get the same guy to play Dredd and the same restraint on the part of the scriptwriters, they could make a dozen of those things and I’d pay for tickets.Report
Yeah. One of the best parts is that he never took off his helmet. Not many actors will do that. I heard that was one reason peoples masks kept getting trashed in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman Movies-contractually required face time. Keith Urban also does a good job emoting with just his mouth (not that Dredd has a complex character). Actually, that ties into another thing I liked about the movie, they did not try to give Dredd some sort of arc. There is no background to explain how he came to be who he is. He does not really change by the end of the movie. He is just a no-nonsense, violent force of justice. All the development was given to his partner, who could not be replaced by a sexy lamp. That also makes this a movie for feminists.Report
Finished Alive (the book).
Honestly, not nearly as horrid as I thought it would be.
But more gangrene.Report
Second half of Breaking Bad’s 5th season is beginning this Sunday, 10 p.m. EDT on AMC.
You should watch it.Report