I’ve mentioned before that Maribou and I do little date nights during the week where we do little more than watch a show together before bed. The shows *TEND* to be light… Rocky and Bullwinkle, Batman: The Animated Series and such… but, sometimes, we branch out to Wheel of Time and that Reacher show.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that Wheel of Time or Reacher are particularly good shows for “right before bed”. Too many stressful situations, too many cliffhangers, and Reacher tends to have at least one really good fistfight per episode and the last thing I need right before falling asleep is a jolt of adrenaline.
Which brings me to Psych. We’ve started watching Psych.
This was a show from around 2006 (hey, it’s old enough to vote!) and the general conceit is that it’s a light comedy police procedural where Our Protagonist, Shawn Spencer, is a gifted kid who was raised somewhat strictly by his police officer dad and pushed to get really, really good at observing things. So good, in fact, that he can pass as psychic for the local police department during the waning days when police departments still hired psychics on as consultants.
I mean, I hope it was the waning days. I’d hate to think that police departments still hire psychics…
Anyway, Our Protagonist is charming as heck, a bit of a slacker, has a just-on-the-nice-side-of-stressful relationship with his dad (Barry Corbin), and has a Heterosexual Life Partner in his best friend Gus, and every episode is devoted to Shawn refusing to grow up but solving the case anyway.
There is usually a little bit of cringe comedy (of which I am not particularly a fan) but, for the most part, it’s a charming and light-hearted show. Even though it usually involves a murder or two or three. Life goes on.
One thing that surprised me was that, when I first saw a few episodes back in 2006, I thought that the police officer foil had a stick up his butt and needed to lighten up. Now that it is the current year, I watch the same show and think “this guy is a serious person doing a serious job and he resents that a psychic comes in and helps solve cases”.
I wondered if I’d stall out and not make it through the first season but I am surprised to find myself downright charmed. Though Shawn is much more obnoxious in the current year than he was in 2006.
This weekend will be spent doing multiple get-togethers. We’re meeting up with dear friends to just eat and hang out on Friday night and, Saturday, we’re doing the eating and gaming with our gaming group. And it’s the last weekend before Lent! Golly! Time flies.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Dignity”. Photo taken by the author.)
I came home from work yesterday to find my wife in the living room and the Echo playing the I Dream of Jeannie theme song. This is not a usual situation (well at least not the theme song part), so I looked at my wife quizzically, and she explained that about 15 minutes earlier, she was reminiscing about the old TV show Flipper and asked Alexa to play the theme song. Which it did, but then instead of stopping after that was done, it started playing other theme songs (apparently that’s how it works now — after it’s done complying with your original request, it goes on to play what it considers related songs), and she had been spending the last 15 minutes in a sort of combination of nostalgia and Name That Show.
So of course I sat down and joined her in the effort/experience, and there we sat for the next 90 minutes or so, reacting as each new theme song came on. Between the two of us, our actual identification rate was definitely less than 50%, but our “OMG i totally watched that, what is it??” rate was more like 90%. It was incredibly addicting — we didn’t set out to spend our evening that way but the “ok just one more” temptation was very difficult to resist.
It was interesting how even when we didn’t know the show, the decade was generally easy to identify. Overall the range was late 50s to early 90s, but the bulk of them were from the 60s.Report
Dinner at my favorite chain chicken place tonight: Nando’s Peri-Peri.
We’ve been working our way through What We Do in the Shadows of late. If you like comedic vampires, this show is right up your alley. Matt Berry as an oversexed Laszlo Cravensworth is a treasure.
Tomorrow we’re getting together with my mom and siblings to play Skyjo. Extremely fun card game that’s easy to kibbitz over.Report
I love Nando’s (I’m not a big chicken fan). Sadly, I only ate there once. I’m putting bets on whether I’ll ever eat there again. It’s not looking likely.Report
I hadn’t bought a new bike for more than 25 years, and the current pair no longer fit my needs. I’m no longer willing to bounce through the kind of places the mountain bike was for, nor ride as fast as I used the road bike for. So this week I bought a new bike to meet my old-man needs. Since this year’s second false spring has extended into the weekend, and the city/county have opened a new section of the Cache la Poudre River trail, I’m going riding this afternoon. Once the county pours the last quarter mile (soon!), the paved-in-some-fashion trail will extend for 40 miles, starting from where the river comes out of the canyon at the base of the foothills.
February was the clean up and document the software I’ve written/maintained for this site. March’s project is cleaning up my old cartogram software and the bulk data sets that feed into it. Not all of the data is actually stable, since we’re still futzing around with the borders of a few US House districts. No politics, so no actual discussion of those borders.Report