TV 2021

 I have a 40+” screen at home, hooked up to a DVD player and an XBOX One.  The latter serves 95% of the time for streaming and 5% for those green boxes with game DVDs in them.  It’s reached the point where I have to keep track of which streaming service the show I want to keep watching is on…

I’m old enough to remember television:  three major VHF channels:  Channel 4 was NBC, Channel 7 was ABC, and Channel 9 was CBS (Washington DC area).  There were some UHF channels with PBS and other odd channels.  We moved to Paris in 1979 and did not care much for French TV, even if some of that was US shows dubbed into French.   When we went up to SHAPE we could watch AFN (Armed Forces Network) TV at the Raymond Hotel in Mons, Belgium – that was older US TV shows with public service announcements where advertising would normally be.  The primary purpose of the big 26” TV in a wooden box was to put the humungous VCR on top to watch VHS tapes: first ones being the 1976 “King Kong” with Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, and Charles Grodin, and first recorded movie being “The Odessa File” (1974 with Jon Voigt).  Our friends had relatives back in the Boston area taping US TV shows for us, but their tastes were along the lines of Lawrence Welk and “Murder, She Wrote”.  You know, old people stuff.  But we’re talking about the early 1980s, well before FOX and more provocative programming. 

Eventually DVDs came around, plus the flat screen TVs far larger than 26”.  Now we’ve got streaming.

Netflix.  Remarkably, I STILL borrow DVDs from Netflix.  However, the days when a red envelope wound up back with them the day after, and I received my next movie the day after that, seem to be long gone.  However, a note “DVD ONLY” for a movie does not discourage me at all:  send it to me and I’ll watch it.  You’ve spared me the need to find it on YouTube or buy it used. 

Shows I’ve been watching:  The Crown (still season 1), Schitt$ Creek (finished season 1), Disenchantment (previously finished S2, but rewatching S1 again now that S3 is available), Umbrella Academy (finished S1), The Politician (finished S1).  I was watching the Original Twilight Zone (finished S4), Peaky Blinders (finished S1), Riverdale (finished S2), and as noted in the last blog, Babylon Berlin.  Their original programming is competitive and watchable.

Amazon Prime.  The $12.99 membership gives some excellent viewing – plus free shipping and far quicker delivery times than USPS these days.  Shows:  Goliath (finished S2), Suits (finished S1), 30 Rock (finished S1), Roadkill (still plowing through S1, brings me back to my earlier days working on my cars and subscribing to Car Craft), The Boys (finished S2, glad to hear S3 is on its way), Tin Star (finished S2), and of course, High in the Man Castle.  

Hulu.  I had to get Hulu to continue with season 4 of Burn Notice – that Miami-based show about the CIA operative, Michael Weston (Jeffrey Donovan) who was inexplicably fired from the CIA while in the middle of an operation in Lagos, Nigeria and is trying to figure out what happened, while he takes miscellaneous jobs – narrated by him in the first person – which take advantage of his unusual skill set.  Sharon Gless of “Cagney & Lacey” plays his mom (Tyne Daley guest stars in one episode) and Bruce “Army of Darkness” Campbell is his FBI buddy, Sam Axe, who helps out.  There’s also a hot skinny chick, Gabrielle Anwar, as his “no, I am NOT gay, Sam and I are just friends” GF and close associate.  I can’t help calling this “BURN!!” (KELSO!) Notice.  Hulu also has Black Jesus – Aaron “Boondocks” McGruder’s most recent thing – and Archer, including the most recent season 11.  

Disney+.  This has ALL of “The Simpsons” (just finished Season 16) and all the “Star Wars” stuff, including our beloved Man Delorean. 

CBS All Access.   This has all the Star Trek stuff:  the movies, the Original Series, plus Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks, plus the movies. 

Binge Watching.  I think we’ve reached a critical mass where they are coming out with new TV shows faster than anyone can watch them.  As for watching a show from start to finish nonstop, even if it’s only one season, I don’t have the patience for that.  I prefer to mix things up.  Recently I was alternating “M*A*S*H” (Season 4, we’ve got BJ Hunnicutt and Colonel Potter, but still Major Frank Burns) and “Modern Family” (Season 10, Alex graduates from CalTech, Dylan and Haley have twins).   Both of those, however, I was watching on DVD, not streaming.

Destination Berlin

I’ve been fortunate in my life to have lived in Paris from 1979 to 1990, and visited other places, such as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Bucharest, Romania, and several different places in Europe.  But one place in particular has eluded me thus far, and I do want to go there before I die (after, if that’s possible):  BERLIN.

[I actually covered this topic on March 2, 2012 with a blog titled simply "Berlin".  However, that mostly covers a fiction novel, The Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson, and a nonfiction book, Berlin At War, by Roger Moorhouse.  Fortunately most of the current blog does not repeat the prior one.]

Initially the capital of Prussia, and then the capital of unified, Imperial Germany (1871-1918), the Weimar Republic (1918-1933 – though my high school history professor, Mr. Mimmack, noted that since Adolf Hitler took power by legitimate means in January 1933, technically Nazi Germany qualifies as an extension of the Weimar Republic itself), and Nazi Germany (1933-45).  

After World War II, both Germany itself and Berlin were separated into East and West.  East Berlin was the capital of East Germany, more officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR in English, DDR in German), whereas the West German capital, of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublic Deutschland, in German) was Bonn, best known as the birthplace of Ludwig von Beethoven, though he moved to Vienna at 21.    

In 1961 the East Germans, fed up with their own people escaping from boring, oppressive East Berlin into West Berlin, built a WALL (no thanks to Roger Waters, though he did play a concert there) – eventually torn down in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing the East Bloc down with it as well.  Berlin finally became one city again.

Germany vs. Prussia vs. Brandenburg.   Brandenburg is a province of Prussia.  Up until 1871, Prussia was a sovereign state, a kingdom run by a king (konig).  Of the various different entities which collectively made up what became Germany in 1871, Prussia was the most important.  Bismarck, the architect of Prussia’s success against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870) orchestrated Prussia’s takeover of the rest of Germany to become the empire, and the King of Prussia, of the Hohenzollern dynasty, became the Emperor (Kaiser) of Germany.  Was Germany truly unified, or did Prussia simply take over the rest?  During WWI, the various different kingdoms and principalities supplied their own armies to the cause, with varying degrees of independence, Bavaria being the second-strongest after Prussia.  In any case, Brandenburg was a sub-part of Prussia, which itself was a sub-part of Germany. 

The fervent Germanophile I have been, I was obviously fascinated by Berlin, but so long as it was divided into West and East, with that pesky, inconvenient WALL, my interest was attenuated.  I wanted to experience the Berlin of the Kaiser, Weimar Republic, and Nazi-Town.  Since time travel still doesn’t exist, that’s not a realistic option, but maybe one day I can visit the current city, which has enjoyed reunification for the past 30 years. 

Unknown.  A recent film with Liam Neeson, January Jones, and Diane Kruger, taking place in modern Berlin.  Neeson plays a guy who winds up with amnesia after his cab plunges into the river.  He has to figure what is going on, while other considerably less polite people try to kill him.  The TV Tower and Brandenburg Gate feature prominently – and one character is a former Stasi (East Germany secret police) agent. 

Babylon Berlin.  I reviewed this series after its second season and watched the third when it came out.  Oddly, I don’t see much in the way of panoramic views of the city in this show.  For that matter, I don’t recall seeing Brandenburg Gate at any point in the series.  Although set in Berlin, I don’t see nearly enough of it to make a difference.  Likewise with “Gentlemen Comrades” taking place in Moscow in 1918.  My guess is that too much has changed in Berlin and Moscow to allow those cities, at the present time, to effectively portray their older selves.  I recall reading about “The Last Samurai”, that Tom Cruise movie from way back, taking place in Yokohama in the late nineteenth century but filmed on a soundstage somewhere because present day Yokohama is full of neon and skyscrapers and looks nothing like its late nineteenth century self.

That being the case, I’m on notice that if “Babylon Berlin” cannot show me old-timey Berlin, there’s a limit to how much I can enjoy.  However, the following appear to be the most famous Berlin landmarks: Brandenburg Gate (1788); the rebuilt Reichtag (no longer on fire); the TV Tower; Charlottenburg Palace, the Gendarmenmarkt; the Tiergarten & the Victory Column; the Kurfurstendam (commercial avenue, Berlin’s Champs Elysees), and Unter den Linden (fancy tree-lined avenue).  Needless to say, if I did visit, I would appreciate a tour.   

Intelligent Evil

 

The events of January 6, 2021 provided the spectacle of a mass of clue-deficient, so-called “patriots” storming the US Capitol in a traitorous attempt to prevent Congress certifying the November 2020 election victory of Joe Biden, according to a bogus and idiotic assertion that somehow that election was “stolen”.   Trump himself tried to have his cake and eat it too by tweeting law and order, respect for the police, but also reiterating the underlying premise of the protest, that the election was stolen.  By doing so he encouraged the protesters to make a clumsy and retarded attempt at a coup.  Sorry, but incompetence in attempting your crime is not a defense.

For all the rampant idiocy among Trumpers, sadly there’s also a more subtle, behind-the-scenes support by those who “should know better”.  That’s all the Trump supporters out there, not wearing MAGA hats or carrying misspelled racist signs, Confederate flags, or swastikas, who nonetheless defend Trump and criticize his opponents.  They are very intelligent, but sadly use their intelligence not to objectively evaluate which candidate is best for America, but simply to take Trump’s superiority as an irrebuttable fact and then work backwards to justify that decision. 

From January 1933 to April 1945, Europe in general and Germany in particular suffered the scourge of the National Socialists, better known as the Nazis.  While the mass of brownshirted stormtroopers may have struck many as idiots and morons, unfortunately for Germany not all Nazis were stupid.  Probably the cleverest Nazi was their propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels.

In “Life of Brian”, the People’s Front of Judea, led by Reg (John Cleese), demand, “what have the Romans ever done for us”?   The answer?  Sanitation, wine, and – it goes without saying (!) – the roads.   I was re-watching “Band of Brothers”, and there’s a scene later in the series in which two German boys look from an overpass as US troops in troop carriers travel east through Germany on the Autobahn, on both sides of the highway, while German POWs march on foot, using the grassy median, westward into camps for the duration of the war.  Then you’ve got the Blue Oyster Cult album Secret Treaties, the cover of which shows an ME262, the first widely used operational fighter jet (with BOC markings rather than the swastika).   The Stg-44 was the world’s first assault rifle.  The Nazis also gave us reel-to-reel tapes, Adidas and Puma shoes, and Hugo Boss.  Generals such as Rommel and Guderian were very good at what they did, and the Waffen SS had no shortage of capable commanders.  Again, sadly for Europe, intelligence and evil are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  We can be thankful that the world’s best nuclear physicists at the time were Jewish, and the non-Jewish German nuclear scientists took a wrong turn at the conceptual level, a dead end which prevented them from developing nuclear weapons.  See Stephen Fry’s Making History, an alternate history novel in which a different, more astute leader led Nazi Germany, hiding his anti-Semitism until after the Nazis had developed nukes and won WWII – and then wiped out Europe’s Jews. 

It’s clear to me that Trump himself and many of his minions definitely have fascist tendencies.  Fortunately for us, Trump himself is too lazy to be a dictator.  That’s too much work.  Moreover, the critical mass of public opinion in this country is sufficient to induce his more intelligent supporters to keep a low profile, rather than actively work to make him an effective dictator.  For all his dull mediocrity, “Sleepy Joe” Biden managed to persuade a majority of American voters to support him.  As I noted earlier, that itself doesn’t surprise me; what surprises me is that his margin of victory wasn’t higher.  He was less divisive than Hillary Clinton, who herself won the popular vote in 2016.   Trump himself alienated so many Republicans that prominent ones such as GWB and Colin Powell actually endorsed Biden.  When top level politicians in your own party endorse your opponent, that’s a sign you may lose the election.  Certainly it was NOT stolen. 

That being the case, however, we’re on notice that a subsequent potential dictator who is smarter and more motivated than Donald Trump has a deep and wide – though numerically minority – wellspring of support on which to build and draw should the occasion arise.   This isn’t over yet. 

GOP & LP 2024

It looks like we’re finally getting rid of #45 and replacing him with a Democrat who most people choose because he’s not nearly as obnoxiously incompetent as Trump and not nearly as arrogant and unlikable as Hillary Clinton.  Over the last 4 years, the Republican President cost his party the House (2018 midterms) and the Senate (losing both Georgia seats).   He’s compromised the integrity and reputations of all the Republican congressmen who were induced to follow him, not that we’re particularly sympathetic to their plight.  What’s next for the GOP?

 My suggestion, likely to be immediately rejected by everyone, is for the party to break up.  Any Republican with something close to ethics and real values should defect to the Libertarian Party.   I can understand most politicians’ reluctance to do so piecemeal, in dribs and drabs, but a wholesale defection of sitting Congressmen should be another story entirely.  Possibly, but not likely, some Democrats could also defect, though as I write this I can’t identify any plausible candidates by name.  The leading Republicans would be Mitt Romney, Justin Amash, Rand Paul, and Thomas Massie, just to name a few. 

I’ve been re-reading, for the third time, Harry Turtledove’s alternate history series which begins with How Few Remain and continues with three WWI stories, three interwar stories, and four WWII stories.  Herein, the CSA won the Civil War (1861-62), also defeated the US in the so-called Second Mexican War (1881-82), and allied itself with Britain, France and Russia in WWI.  For its part, the US found itself allied with Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.  Now imagine US and Confederate soldiers fighting in trenches, with biplanes, machine guns, and poison gas, but in western Virginia, Kentucky, and other locations.  The CSA had purchased Sonora and Chihuahua states from Mexico in 1881, so their territory extends westward from Texas, along the New Mexico/Arizona border to the Pacific Ocean, giving the CSA a Pacific Coast port city at Guaymas.  They also have Cuba.

 In the aftermath of the Second Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln – who was not assassinated in 1865 but survived to become a Marxist – split up the Republican Party in 1882 into a Socialist Party, with the Democrats taking the role of a conservative/reactionary party.  The twin Presidents in 1914 are Theodore Roosevelt (USA) and Woodrow Wilson (CSA).  By this time the Republicans are reduced to an insignificant third party.

 The LP candidate in 2020 was Jo Jorgenson, who had no experience as an elected official and her prime political experience was being Harry Browne’s VP candidate back in the day.   Gary Johnson, the 2016 candidate, was much stronger: a successful two term state governor (New Mexico).  His 2012 result, 1%, was somewhat disappointing, but he was up against both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  In 2016 he received 3%, and probably would have gotten more had he known where Aleppo, Syria, was.  If the LP has former state governors or US senators as its candidates – the kind of candidates the major parties run – they may well have a much stronger shot. 

 Returning to reality, I do believe the heretofore marginal Libertarian Party may well be able to accommodate a large influx of dissatisfied Republicans.  Sadly, over the years the Republicans went from Lincoln’s party abolishing slavery to a conservative party giving lip service to capitalism but more accurately being a quasi-fascist party giving us a corrupt form of capitalism mixed with religious right nonsense telling us how to live our private lives.  The Libertarians, in many ways, are a more pure and principled form of what the Republican Party would be if it actually adhered to many of the ideals which it claims to stand for but which fall by the wayside either due to true indifference or political reality.   Trump’s debacle here in 2020 can serve as the impetus for the more principled Republicans to abandon the party altogether and turn the Libertarian Party from a marginal third party to a real competitor with the Democrats. 

 Quoting Picard:  MAKE IT SO.

New Year's Eve 2.0

 

My prior blog on this matter was written and posted in January 2010, 11 years ago.  NYE 2009-2010 was spent in Fort Lee, New Jersey, watching the Times Square festivities with my then-GF, Loni.   That relationship had started in June 2009 and ended in May 2018 when she told me not to bother coming up to visit her anymore.

This year we had darker concerns on our minds – more so than last week, when I wrote my Election blog on Christmas Eve.  Our 86 year old mother had gone to the hospital in July for an operation, and from then to the present had been switching back and forth from hospitals to assisted living facilities, with her mental health severely deteriorating.  We last saw her in person on December 16, and last saw her on FaceTime (smartphone video conference) on Christmas Day.   On December 17 we were informed that she tested positive for COVID.  On Sunday, December 27, despite initially resisting the illness, we received word that she was being transferred back to the hospital again.  My brother and I, by her bedside at the ER, watched her breathing get progressively slower until it ended altogether.  By now, at 51, I’ve experienced multiple family deaths, including my own father’s departure in December 2004 of a stroke.  However, his removal from life support and expiration took place outside my personal presence.  In this case I was in the room when she actually passed away.   We’re talking about my second parent, from whom neither I nor my siblings have ever been estranged.   It’s a savage blow, and it will take awhile to recover. 

This New Year’s Eve, as with those of 2018 and 2019, was spent alone, in my apartment, watching the Times Square festivities on TV in warmth and privacy with the prerogative to immediately go to bed after the “ball dropped”.  I watched Joel McHale and Ken Jeong (both “Community” veterans) trade off on insulting each other.  Kelly Osbourne reported live from Times Square itself.

Of the umpteen New Year’s Eves spent with Loni in Fort Lee, on no occasion did we actually go to Times Square.  Oddly, that part of NYC is only a Forty-Second Street block from Seventh to Eighth Ave. and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the 158 Bus to Fort Lee, an hour trip which ends two blocks from her house.  On one particular NYE, she was actually working at Citizen, its flagship watch store at Times Square itself, that day, and returned to Fort Lee long before midnight, watching everything with me on TV.  But we shared the indifference to being in Times Square itself.  Most of the crowd acknowledges being from out of town. 

As noted, on two NYE’s I was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with my prior GF, Leila.  In 2000-2001 our lodgings were in Ipanema and we watched the fireworks on the beach from Leme, which is the opposite end of Copacabana.  It was raining, so after the fireworks everyone left the beach at the same time; it took us an hour to get back to where we were staying (in between the beach and the Lagoa).  In 2002-2003 we were staying in Copacabana, there was no rain, so after the fireworks we simply walked back two blocks to where we were staying.  Winter (June through September) in Rio means 70 degrees, fog on the beach, and it gets dark at 6 p.m.  NYE is during Rio’s summer, which means 90 degrees, no fog, and it gets dark at 9 p.m.  Spending NYE outdoors makes a bit more sense in this context – or in someplace like Miami, Phoenix, or California.   Just my two cents.

Chinese/Vietnamese New Year.  Both cultures follow a lunar calendar which puts the New Year sometime in January or February.   In 2021 that will be February 12 – for Year of the Ox.  Those of us familiar with the Vietnam War know that the Viets call this “TET”, and in 1968 the VC/NVA launched a huge attack all over South Vietnam.  During the course of that battle, ARVN general Loan Ngoc Nguyen summarily executed a VC prisoner, Lem Van Nguyen, who himself had murdered an ARVN officer’s entire family – including wife and children.  The picture and movie footage are abrupt and disturbing, but even cameraman Eddie Adams regrets it, as you can’t see the full circumstances of that incident. 

My own experience is two-fold.   First, the aforementioned Loni – from Shanghai, China – would take us to Flushing, Queens, and we’d have some sort of meal at a restaurant there.   Second, the firm I work at in Falls Church, Virginia has a majority Vietnamese clientele, so around Tet-time our office manager would have the Buddhist monks bless our office, and the nearby Eden Center would be in Tet mode. 

With that, absent any more developments, I have exhausted what I might have to say about this topic.  Happy New Year!