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shadowkat1. In the Jungle: Inside the Long Hidden Genealogy of The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Introduction
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. He hadn’t composed the melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, which was taken to England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa.
Later, the song took flight and landed in America, where it mutated into a truly immortal pop epiphany that soared to the top of the charts here and then everywhere, again and again, returning every decade or so under different names and guises. Navajo Indians sing it at powwows. Japanese teenagers know it as ライオンは寝ている. The French have a version sung in Congolese. Phish perform it live. It has been recorded by artists as diverse as R.E.M. and Glen Campbell, Brian Eno and Chet Atkins, the Nylons and Muzak schlockmeister Bert Kaempfert. The New Zealand army band turned it into a march. England’s 1986 World Cup soccer squad turned it into a joke. Hollywood put it in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It has logged nearly three decades of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. alone. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows.
Its epic transcultural saga is also, in a way, the story of popular music, which limped pale-skinned and anemic into the twentieth century but danced out the other side vastly invigorated by transfusions of ragtime and rap, jazz, blues and soul, all of whose bloodlines run back to Africa via slave ships and plantations and ghettos. It was in the nature of this transaction that black men gave more than they got and often ended up with nothing. This one’s for Solomon Linda, then, a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave. Let’s take it from the top, as they say in the trade.
2. An innocent man spent 46 years in prison, and made a plan to kill the man who put him there
Not what I thought.
Richard Phillips is a tall man with broad shoulders and a habit of singing to himself, usually without words, a deep and joyful sound that seems to rise from his soul. He began singing when he was a boy, and kept singing in prison, and now sings in the car, and at the dinner table, sustaining that one long note, as if nothing in the world could stop the music.
Two days after he was sentenced to life in prison in 1972, Phillips wrote a poem. It may have been the first poem he ever wrote. He was 26 years old, and had left high school in tenth grade, and now, with plenty of time to wonder, he took a pencil and set his wondering down on the page. He wondered about the color of raindrops, the color of the sky, the color of his heart, the color of his words when he sang aloud, and the color of his need for someone to hold. He missed holding his children, missed lacing their shoes and wiping away their tears, and he knew the only way he’d ever return to them was to somehow prove his innocence.
One appeal failed in 1974, another in 1975. Phillips thought he might win with a better lawyer, so he took a job at the prison’s license-plate factory, in the inking department, catching freshly inked plates as they came out of the chute and sending them by conveyor belt to the drying oven. The wages were bad by civilian standards but good by prison standards, maybe $100 a month plus bonuses, and Phillips opened a bank account and watched the money accumulate.
About four years later he had enough to pay one of the best appellate lawyers in Michigan, so he sent in the money and waited for freedom. All the while he thought of his children, and remembered the taste of homemade ice cream, and wrote love poems to women, both real and imaginary, featuring beds made of violets and warm baths made of tears.
3. Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies?
Arborists often claim that all-male plants are “litter-free” because they shed no messy seeds, fruits or pods. In the 1949 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture, which focused on trees and forests, this advice was given to readers: “When used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.” In the years following, the USDA produced and released into the market almost 100 new red maple and hybrid-maple-named clones (cultivars), and every single one of them was male.
These new male trees were soon joined by clonal male plants from a great many other dioecious tree species (having distinct males and females) such as willows, poplars, aspens, ash, silver maples, pistache, mulberry, pepper tree, etc. The wholesale growers also learned how to select male scion wood from trees that were monoecious (individuals with both male and female productive systems), and we started to see trees never seen before in nature, such as seedless cypress and pod-less honeylocust trees. If we take live wood (scion material) from a tree and grow it (asexually) from cuttings, grafting, or budding, it will be clonal, and will be the same sex as the tree it came from.
Not satisfied with just the trees, the commercial growers then produced a flood of all-male shrubs, junipers, yew pines, fern pines, wax myrtles, alpine currants, plum yews, yews and more. In the past few years we’ve even seen all-male hanging basket plants like begonias. The problem is that while these trees and plants are “litter-free”, they all produce abundant allergenic pollen.
Prior to the 1970s there was only limited demand for new street trees, since almost every street in America seemed to be lined with those big, grand, long-lived stately American elm trees. But then Dutch elm disease struck and suddenly millions of our city trees started to die. By the mid-1980s many millions of elms had died and many streets were suddenly treeless. Enter the new modern, university-recommended trees: the clonal males. In short order millions of these wind-pollinated trees were grown, sold and planted to replace the old insect-pollinated elms.
It took a number of years for these new trees to mature enough to start to bloom, but eventually they did and with them came more city pollen and the “epidemic of allergy and asthma.” Many of these same trees are still alive and well and getting even larger, and the bigger they get, the more pollen they shed.
Despite what we often read about pollen blowing in from hundreds of miles away, in fact most pollen lands and sticks quite close to where it is shed. The greatest amount of pollen from a large tree will normally land within 20-30 feet from the dripline of the tree itself. This translates to what is known as “proximity pollinosis” or allergy that is triggered by the plants closest to where we live, work, play or go to school. Almost all urban allergies now come directly from the planted landscape–they are homegrown.
Allergies are rarely triggered by small amounts of an allergen; they are initiated by an overdose. Small amounts of pollen exposure are actually good for us, but if we have highly allergenic trees or shrubs in our own yards or lining our streets, we will soon enough be over-exposed. In order to put the brakes on America’s allergy epidemic, we need to reverse the trend toward male-dominated landscapes and stop selling and planting any more of the most allergenic trees, shrubs and grasses in our cities.
4. Television Shows.
*Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist - the second to final episode - wherein I spent almost the entire episode yelling at the writers to kill off frigging Max. I wanted Max hit or run over randomly by a bus. And for Mitch to survive instead. What can I say, I've been irritable lately? Also Max's storyline had ruined a perfectly good show - not to mention any contact who came into contact with the abysmal cesspool of a black hole that is Max. He doesn't die, unfortunately. He does however get fired, albeit for the wrong reasons. The work place story made no sense. Leif gets in trouble for sharing code with the fourth floor team, then gets off the hook, and Max gets fired for not figuring out that Lief would steal code to get Joan back in bed. Max should have been sued, and Eva fired for stealing code from the Fourth Floor. Hello. But instead Max gets fired for not knowing Leif was giving Tobin the code? I'm confused. This makes no sense.
I don't ask that shows be completely logical, particularly ones where the heroine keeps seeing and hearing people randomly burst out in song - but it should have rules that make some logical sense, and the world should be consistent and make sense.
As I said, anyone or any storyline that Max gets involved with turns sour. He's the plot cesspool of despair. Zoey acts like a pasty doormat around him, simpering and guilty. Hon, the boy is inappropriately coming on to you in the work place. You're not friends in college or dating, you are working together. He's skipped over a few boundaries. You've hung out as "work" buddies. Hello, boundaries. You set them, he ignored them, you told him to back off and he got pissy and stole code to take to the competitive 6th floor - which hurt the project. On top of which your Dad is dying and you're taking time off to look at cemetary plots and you confided in the idiot that you hear and see people burst out in song. And he's forcing a romantic relationship? Tell him to fuck the hell off and get over his whiny self. Stop being a fucking doormat.
Mo - she mentions Max and things go south.
Writers? Ditch Max. Or I'm gone. Life is stressful enough. Assuming of course it comes back next year, which is kind of up in the air at the moment, along with everything else.
The other (non-Max related) stories were good. I'm continuing to enjoy the family dynamics, the friendship between Joan and Zoey is Golden, as are the Mother/Daughter relationship and the chat between Bernadette Petters Dev and Mary Steenburgen's Mother character. Actually the show does female characters and relationships really really well. Men, not so much. Outside of maybe Mo, who identifies as female, so doesn't count. An episode doesn't go by in which I do not want to smack one of the male characters upside the head. That said, they can keep everyone but Max.
* Rosewell, New Mexico - this has gotten really good. And oh, they actually did a threesome sex scene on broadcast television. Has this been done before? It's hard to know. I was astonished by it. Not put off - I'm not a prude. Kinky sex does not bother me at all. (As you all probably already know by now.) Sexual violence, yes, kinky sex, no. As long as it is consensual and everyone's on board and no one is being hurt or tortured - I don't care what they do or who with. Admittedly, since I'm heterosexual and female, I tend to prefer to watch pretty and muscular male bodies going at it, but that's just a personal preference. We all have our preferences. I won't reveal the others - some things should remain private.
I kind of like the fact that Rosewell is exploring gay, lesbian, and bisexuality along with heterosexual relationships.
The characters are likable in this series. They got rid of the annoying characters, and brought in another female character. Liz's sister Rosa, who I prefer to Noah.
(Noah was a villain so that makes sense.)
Also, the relationships are more interesting. I'm starting to wonder though if Maria's mother might be half alien, and if Maria might be too.
Another thing they are playing with rather well is racism, xenophobia, and alienation as themes utilizing the alien metaphors.
It's a much better show than it was last year, and a smarter one. I'm liking it a lot.
*Nancy Drew
Creepy as all get out in places. But also kind of fun. It was a smart move to add ghosts - Nancy Drew always had a kind of spooky aspect to the mysteries, so adding real ghosts to it, is not a bad move. Makes the series a bit darker and more compelling. Also heightens the tension on the mysteries.
* Steven Universe
I watched "The Many Birthdays" episode which was rather clever. Like I said in a previous post - this thing is unlike any cartoon that I've seen. The artwork isn't necessarily stellar - reminds me a little of magna mixed with Rainbow Brite. But it's not bad either - it's kind of charming actually and rather trippy. I can only imagine what watching this would be like if you were really stoned or taking LSD, and I'm not unconvinced the creators weren't on one or the other.
In Many Birthdays, Steven's gem gets affected by his emotions and he starts aging, going from kid, to teen, to man, to old man, to very old man, to dying and back down again. In the meantime, his co-horts realize how much they need him to be well Steven, and how different he is from them - half-human, they aren't human apparently, and what it means to be playful. Half of the fun of this series is having the world building and characterization provided in snippets in various episodes as opposed to being provided in one huge lump up front and then everything else is kind of a morality play - that's the mistake of most cartoons by the way. They give everything away in the first two episodes, so the audience really has no reason to stick with it. One of the reasons I loved the Monkees as a kid - was it was bizarre, I didn't know why they were doing what they were doing and enjoyed trying to figure it out. Felt the same way about Kimba. The television shows that gave it all to me upfront - kind of bored me by the sixth episode.
Introduction
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened. He hadn’t composed the melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, which was taken to England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa.
Later, the song took flight and landed in America, where it mutated into a truly immortal pop epiphany that soared to the top of the charts here and then everywhere, again and again, returning every decade or so under different names and guises. Navajo Indians sing it at powwows. Japanese teenagers know it as ライオンは寝ている. The French have a version sung in Congolese. Phish perform it live. It has been recorded by artists as diverse as R.E.M. and Glen Campbell, Brian Eno and Chet Atkins, the Nylons and Muzak schlockmeister Bert Kaempfert. The New Zealand army band turned it into a march. England’s 1986 World Cup soccer squad turned it into a joke. Hollywood put it in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It has logged nearly three decades of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. alone. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows.
Its epic transcultural saga is also, in a way, the story of popular music, which limped pale-skinned and anemic into the twentieth century but danced out the other side vastly invigorated by transfusions of ragtime and rap, jazz, blues and soul, all of whose bloodlines run back to Africa via slave ships and plantations and ghettos. It was in the nature of this transaction that black men gave more than they got and often ended up with nothing. This one’s for Solomon Linda, then, a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave. Let’s take it from the top, as they say in the trade.
2. An innocent man spent 46 years in prison, and made a plan to kill the man who put him there
Not what I thought.
Richard Phillips is a tall man with broad shoulders and a habit of singing to himself, usually without words, a deep and joyful sound that seems to rise from his soul. He began singing when he was a boy, and kept singing in prison, and now sings in the car, and at the dinner table, sustaining that one long note, as if nothing in the world could stop the music.
Two days after he was sentenced to life in prison in 1972, Phillips wrote a poem. It may have been the first poem he ever wrote. He was 26 years old, and had left high school in tenth grade, and now, with plenty of time to wonder, he took a pencil and set his wondering down on the page. He wondered about the color of raindrops, the color of the sky, the color of his heart, the color of his words when he sang aloud, and the color of his need for someone to hold. He missed holding his children, missed lacing their shoes and wiping away their tears, and he knew the only way he’d ever return to them was to somehow prove his innocence.
One appeal failed in 1974, another in 1975. Phillips thought he might win with a better lawyer, so he took a job at the prison’s license-plate factory, in the inking department, catching freshly inked plates as they came out of the chute and sending them by conveyor belt to the drying oven. The wages were bad by civilian standards but good by prison standards, maybe $100 a month plus bonuses, and Phillips opened a bank account and watched the money accumulate.
About four years later he had enough to pay one of the best appellate lawyers in Michigan, so he sent in the money and waited for freedom. All the while he thought of his children, and remembered the taste of homemade ice cream, and wrote love poems to women, both real and imaginary, featuring beds made of violets and warm baths made of tears.
3. Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies?
Arborists often claim that all-male plants are “litter-free” because they shed no messy seeds, fruits or pods. In the 1949 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture, which focused on trees and forests, this advice was given to readers: “When used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.” In the years following, the USDA produced and released into the market almost 100 new red maple and hybrid-maple-named clones (cultivars), and every single one of them was male.
These new male trees were soon joined by clonal male plants from a great many other dioecious tree species (having distinct males and females) such as willows, poplars, aspens, ash, silver maples, pistache, mulberry, pepper tree, etc. The wholesale growers also learned how to select male scion wood from trees that were monoecious (individuals with both male and female productive systems), and we started to see trees never seen before in nature, such as seedless cypress and pod-less honeylocust trees. If we take live wood (scion material) from a tree and grow it (asexually) from cuttings, grafting, or budding, it will be clonal, and will be the same sex as the tree it came from.
Not satisfied with just the trees, the commercial growers then produced a flood of all-male shrubs, junipers, yew pines, fern pines, wax myrtles, alpine currants, plum yews, yews and more. In the past few years we’ve even seen all-male hanging basket plants like begonias. The problem is that while these trees and plants are “litter-free”, they all produce abundant allergenic pollen.
Prior to the 1970s there was only limited demand for new street trees, since almost every street in America seemed to be lined with those big, grand, long-lived stately American elm trees. But then Dutch elm disease struck and suddenly millions of our city trees started to die. By the mid-1980s many millions of elms had died and many streets were suddenly treeless. Enter the new modern, university-recommended trees: the clonal males. In short order millions of these wind-pollinated trees were grown, sold and planted to replace the old insect-pollinated elms.
It took a number of years for these new trees to mature enough to start to bloom, but eventually they did and with them came more city pollen and the “epidemic of allergy and asthma.” Many of these same trees are still alive and well and getting even larger, and the bigger they get, the more pollen they shed.
Despite what we often read about pollen blowing in from hundreds of miles away, in fact most pollen lands and sticks quite close to where it is shed. The greatest amount of pollen from a large tree will normally land within 20-30 feet from the dripline of the tree itself. This translates to what is known as “proximity pollinosis” or allergy that is triggered by the plants closest to where we live, work, play or go to school. Almost all urban allergies now come directly from the planted landscape–they are homegrown.
Allergies are rarely triggered by small amounts of an allergen; they are initiated by an overdose. Small amounts of pollen exposure are actually good for us, but if we have highly allergenic trees or shrubs in our own yards or lining our streets, we will soon enough be over-exposed. In order to put the brakes on America’s allergy epidemic, we need to reverse the trend toward male-dominated landscapes and stop selling and planting any more of the most allergenic trees, shrubs and grasses in our cities.
4. Television Shows.
*Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist - the second to final episode - wherein I spent almost the entire episode yelling at the writers to kill off frigging Max. I wanted Max hit or run over randomly by a bus. And for Mitch to survive instead. What can I say, I've been irritable lately? Also Max's storyline had ruined a perfectly good show - not to mention any contact who came into contact with the abysmal cesspool of a black hole that is Max. He doesn't die, unfortunately. He does however get fired, albeit for the wrong reasons. The work place story made no sense. Leif gets in trouble for sharing code with the fourth floor team, then gets off the hook, and Max gets fired for not figuring out that Lief would steal code to get Joan back in bed. Max should have been sued, and Eva fired for stealing code from the Fourth Floor. Hello. But instead Max gets fired for not knowing Leif was giving Tobin the code? I'm confused. This makes no sense.
I don't ask that shows be completely logical, particularly ones where the heroine keeps seeing and hearing people randomly burst out in song - but it should have rules that make some logical sense, and the world should be consistent and make sense.
As I said, anyone or any storyline that Max gets involved with turns sour. He's the plot cesspool of despair. Zoey acts like a pasty doormat around him, simpering and guilty. Hon, the boy is inappropriately coming on to you in the work place. You're not friends in college or dating, you are working together. He's skipped over a few boundaries. You've hung out as "work" buddies. Hello, boundaries. You set them, he ignored them, you told him to back off and he got pissy and stole code to take to the competitive 6th floor - which hurt the project. On top of which your Dad is dying and you're taking time off to look at cemetary plots and you confided in the idiot that you hear and see people burst out in song. And he's forcing a romantic relationship? Tell him to fuck the hell off and get over his whiny self. Stop being a fucking doormat.
Mo - she mentions Max and things go south.
Writers? Ditch Max. Or I'm gone. Life is stressful enough. Assuming of course it comes back next year, which is kind of up in the air at the moment, along with everything else.
The other (non-Max related) stories were good. I'm continuing to enjoy the family dynamics, the friendship between Joan and Zoey is Golden, as are the Mother/Daughter relationship and the chat between Bernadette Petters Dev and Mary Steenburgen's Mother character. Actually the show does female characters and relationships really really well. Men, not so much. Outside of maybe Mo, who identifies as female, so doesn't count. An episode doesn't go by in which I do not want to smack one of the male characters upside the head. That said, they can keep everyone but Max.
* Rosewell, New Mexico - this has gotten really good. And oh, they actually did a threesome sex scene on broadcast television. Has this been done before? It's hard to know. I was astonished by it. Not put off - I'm not a prude. Kinky sex does not bother me at all. (As you all probably already know by now.) Sexual violence, yes, kinky sex, no. As long as it is consensual and everyone's on board and no one is being hurt or tortured - I don't care what they do or who with. Admittedly, since I'm heterosexual and female, I tend to prefer to watch pretty and muscular male bodies going at it, but that's just a personal preference. We all have our preferences. I won't reveal the others - some things should remain private.
I kind of like the fact that Rosewell is exploring gay, lesbian, and bisexuality along with heterosexual relationships.
The characters are likable in this series. They got rid of the annoying characters, and brought in another female character. Liz's sister Rosa, who I prefer to Noah.
(Noah was a villain so that makes sense.)
Also, the relationships are more interesting. I'm starting to wonder though if Maria's mother might be half alien, and if Maria might be too.
Another thing they are playing with rather well is racism, xenophobia, and alienation as themes utilizing the alien metaphors.
It's a much better show than it was last year, and a smarter one. I'm liking it a lot.
*Nancy Drew
Creepy as all get out in places. But also kind of fun. It was a smart move to add ghosts - Nancy Drew always had a kind of spooky aspect to the mysteries, so adding real ghosts to it, is not a bad move. Makes the series a bit darker and more compelling. Also heightens the tension on the mysteries.
* Steven Universe
I watched "The Many Birthdays" episode which was rather clever. Like I said in a previous post - this thing is unlike any cartoon that I've seen. The artwork isn't necessarily stellar - reminds me a little of magna mixed with Rainbow Brite. But it's not bad either - it's kind of charming actually and rather trippy. I can only imagine what watching this would be like if you were really stoned or taking LSD, and I'm not unconvinced the creators weren't on one or the other.
In Many Birthdays, Steven's gem gets affected by his emotions and he starts aging, going from kid, to teen, to man, to old man, to very old man, to dying and back down again. In the meantime, his co-horts realize how much they need him to be well Steven, and how different he is from them - half-human, they aren't human apparently, and what it means to be playful. Half of the fun of this series is having the world building and characterization provided in snippets in various episodes as opposed to being provided in one huge lump up front and then everything else is kind of a morality play - that's the mistake of most cartoons by the way. They give everything away in the first two episodes, so the audience really has no reason to stick with it. One of the reasons I loved the Monkees as a kid - was it was bizarre, I didn't know why they were doing what they were doing and enjoyed trying to figure it out. Felt the same way about Kimba. The television shows that gave it all to me upfront - kind of bored me by the sixth episode.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 03:41 am (UTC)*************
I think there's a lot of history between Max and Zoey--far beyond their working at SPRQ Point--that we're not being shown. Just telling us about it doesn't convey the depth of their friendship, and it damages the characters.
BTW, I thought Ava had a perfect right to dump Max as a project manager. He was sloppy about protecting the project code, and you can't have a manager who's careless about industrial espionage (even if it was internal). Firing him outright? That was a mistake. It just frees him to work for another company and create new products that cut into SPRQ Point's market share. A showy but strategically unsound power move (that was perfectly in character for Ava). Prediction: Joan hires Max back next week, and we're back to status quo. (Mostly.)
But I'll get into all of this after the finale.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 12:32 pm (UTC)Why Lief wasn't also fired, seemed odd to me. And Tobin for that matter.
They'd have been gone in reality.
Keep in mind that I've been watching Disney animation before or after the Steven Universe. So, it is simplestic in comparison to the insane amount of detail and individualize characterization of some of the early Disney stuff. Also, I'm an artist - if I can draw it, I tend to be more critical of it. (I can draw the Steven stuff.)
That caveat aside, it's better than most of the cartoons out there and says a lot with minimalism. Also, it's doing a good job of distinguishing characters which Disney doesn't do as well. Plus kudos for being more well-rounded and less stiff than Bojack Horseman, and far more creative and innovative than Matt Groenig - whose characters all look the same and have the same expressions. Steven's animators at least know how to distinguish the characters. (There appears to be a team from the credits, I could be wrong about that.)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 04:14 pm (UTC)***************
Prodigal Son's season finale was last night. It wrapped up the season's plotlines very nicely.
Interested in a rundown?
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 05:11 pm (UTC)Yeah, Joan was too short handed..she was doing coding. Her main group consisted of evil!Max, Lusty!Leif, Tobin and Zoey. She was down Max, and Lief...sigh.
Ride or Die
Date: 2020-04-28 06:19 pm (UTC)My household is ride or die with Prodigal Son. As long as Lou Diamond Phillips is a regular, we're not going anywhere. (My wife has been in love with him since La Bamba.)
And, Max or no Max, I'm not leaving ZEP. The last episode had four of my dream women (Lauren Graham, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Mary Steenburgen, and Bernadette Peters)!
Talk about fan service!
When are the women in the audience going to get some fan service? I mean, Simon isn't bad, but NBC can do better. How about Brian Stokes Mitchell? Daveed Diggs? They need to beef up the show a little!
Re: Ride or Die
Date: 2020-04-28 06:28 pm (UTC)Simon's and Peter Gallagher are all I've got on the male. I'm guessing the writers think Max is hot? He's not. A Zack Efron would be nice.
They've done better with the female casting than the male for some reason, also better with the characterization.
There's only one episode left - so it's not like there's much to leave over. And I really don't know what is coming back next year at this point. So much is in flux.
I haven't deleted Prodigal Son yet. The reason I'm not watching at the moment is it's too dark for me. I can't watch or focus on anything that isn't fluffy at the moment. Come on - I'm watching Disney films on Disney + and Steven Universe. The darkest I can go are the fluffy soapish dramas on The CW and General Hospital. LOL!
I was considering renting Terminator: Dark Fate and nixed it - because I can't handle the subject matter.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 01:24 pm (UTC)Honestly, this is the embodiment of the whiny entitled nerdy guy best bud trope - that I despise in fiction. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did it with Xander - who was more tolerable, possibly because the writers liked to smack him upside the head for it, and depicted why it was such a bad trope.
I found the bar scene where he's whining about Zoey not returning his affections, while Joan is trying to comfort Zoey about losing her father, almost unwatchable.