Friday, 28 March 2014

11:15 – Among other things today, I’m trying to get purchase orders done for a lot of stuff we buy in bulk–cases of beakers, graduated cylinders, test tube brushes and clamps, microscope slides and cover slips, and so on. It’s still only March, but I want to get enough component inventory to allow us to start building finished-goods inventory in serious numbers in time for the summer.

We just finished season 3 of The Shield on Amazon streaming, and started Life Unexpected on Netflix streaming. It seems we always have one gritty, violent series in progress along with a “teen drama”. Both of these are no longer being made, which is an advantage because Barbara and I have both come to prefer binge-watching series from start to finish. We have a few in our queue that are still being made and that we’ve watched all available episodes of, but I really prefer not to do that. For example, we’ve watched the first two seasons of Reven8e and are waiting for season three to become available. The problem with doing it that way is that we can never remember what’s happened in earlier seasons. It feels like we should go back and re-watch all the older stuff before we start the new season, and I don’t want to waste time doing that when I could be watching Heartland reruns instead.


20 Comments and discussion on "Friday, 28 March 2014"

  1. OFD says:

    Yikes. I couldn’t keep track of all that. I have one season of whatever going at a time, never watch previous seasons (unless it’s much older stuff like the original Sherlock Holmes series from PBS with Jeremy Brett or the X-Files), and we’ll watch the occasional movie off whatever we can find on the Roku channels now. Plus stuff I have on disk.

    40 here now with winds gusting to 40-50 MPH all night and all day today, freezing rain earlier this morning; fotties through the weekend and maybe 50 by Monday. I see the ice denizens are starting to bail off the lake now.

    Mrs. OFD will be off to Richmond, VA for a week by Sunday; then she’s home for three weeks, and near the end of that time Mr. OFD will be traveling to Mordor with her for a night and a day as she was selected to be on-hand for when her organization breaks out their reach (mental health first aid) to the veteran population. Allegedly Mrs. Biden and Mrs. Obama will also be there. I am to be one of two veteran reps for this caper, but once the authorities latch onto my online rants, they’ll undoubtedly bar me at the door and have me wait outside with the other veteran bums.

    Meanwhile another potential job is percolating, involving yet another background investigation and security clearance hassle.

  2. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Well, we have to balance what Barbara wants to watch in the evenings with what I want to watch (which is exclusively Heartland re-runs).

    The Shield is intense. I suspect it does a better job of representing what inner-city cops have to deal with than any other series has. As just one example, the other night we watched an episode that had them going undercover to bust a child-porn ring. Not the people who download and watch it; the ones who shoot the videos. At one point, one of the undercover cops was in the process of selling two little girls, 8 and 10 years old, to one of the child porn makers. The bastard casually asked them if the 8-year-old already knew how to give blowjobs.

    For situations like this, I really miss the old Southern Plea, “Your Honor, he needed killing.”

  3. MrAtoz says:

    I watched all of The Shield. Great series. The final season wrapped things up nicely.

  4. Chad says:

    For example, we’ve watched the first two seasons of Reven8e and are waiting for season three to become available.

    How is Revenge? I heard it was good the first season, but got bad the second season, and I haven’t heard anything about the third season.

  5. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I think the writing on Reven8e is mediocre at best. Even Barbara agrees that Emily VanCamp is the only thing that makes it worth watching. I’ll watch anything that Emily stars in. I still adore her from Everwood. I even suffered through all 110 episodes of Brothers & Sisters just to see the 75 episodes that Emily was in. (I tried to convince Barbara that we should skip the episodes that Emily wasn’t in, but she refused.)

  6. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Speaking of Emily, I posted this on my journal three or four years ago:

    “I started laughing while we were watching Brothers and Sisters the other night. The scene featured Emily VanCamp, an actress whom I adore, wearing an extremely low-cut and revealing dress. Ordinarily, I look at her face, but this time my attention was riveted on that portion of her anterior anatomy between her axillae. I started laughing because I realized that I wouldn’t have been able to testify in court that Emily VanCamp actually appeared in that scene, and because I remembered the scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Anya, the former vengeance demon, is trying to get Xander to ask her out.

    Anya: Look, I know you find me attractive. I’ve seen you looking at my breasts.
    Xander: Nothing personal, but when a guy does that it just means his eyes are open.

    And it’s true. I’ve sometimes wondered what it must be like to be a woman, routinely having conversations with men, looking into their eyes while they’re looking down at your chest. I know I do it to all my women friends. Fortunately, women seem to have a sense of humor about it.”

  7. OFD says:

    I enjoyed “The Shield” when it was running actively; was thinking of putting it all on disk, but then I moved on to “The Wire,” also a nice depiction of the criminal underworld and cops, set in Baltimore, and a sort of sequel to the great series “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which was based on a book by a guy who rode around with that unit for a while.

  8. rick says:

    And it’s true. I’ve sometimes wondered what it must be like to be a woman, routinely having conversations with men, looking into their eyes while they’re looking down at your chest. I know I do it to all my women friends.

    If a man looks a women in the eyes when they’re talking, does that mean he’s gay or does it just mean he has more self control than most men?

    A British newscaster caused a bit of a stir recently when he said that thinking of all women as potential partners is natural. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2547080/I-think-sex-time-I-meet-woman-says-Jon-Snow-Channel-4-news-host-admits-considers-female-friends-workers.html That’s probably true, although sometimes my immediate response might be “you’ve got to be kidding”.

    Rick in Portland

  9. SteveF says:

    If a man looks a women in the eyes when they’re talking, does that mean he’s gay or does it just mean he has more self control than most men?

    Or doesn’t find her at all attractive. viz (or not) one of the women where I work, who’s in her late 40s and not aging well and is considerably overweight, but dresses to show more tit flesh than is really appropriate or appreciated in a supposedly professional environment. I have no trouble not looking down when I talk to her … if only because if I did, I might barf, and I’m much too polite to barf on a woman I’m talking to.

  10. Lynn McGuire says:

    Trying to get my 2013 personal income taxes done today. It is a real bear with my rental property, business, etc. Looks like I am way over withheld.

  11. Ray Thompson says:

    if only because if I did, I might barf, and I’m much too polite to barf on a woman I’m talking to.

    And barf is really hard to get out of the cleavage.

  12. bgrigg says:

    You have experience in this, Ray? 🙂

  13. OFD says:

    I guess I’m not the only one, then; yeah, many, too many, morbidly obese women seem to delight in showing off as much blubber as they possibly can. And I further guess there are guys out here who dig it.

    And we have a wintuh stom watch in effect through tomorrow; three to six inches of heavy wet snow topped by a nice layer of ice and sleet, in the middle of which Mrs. OFD is supposedly taking a flight to Richmond.

  14. Chuck W says:

    I readily admit that I prefer tiny TT’s (which don’t give much to look at) and find most women’s eyes every bit as sexy as their breasts. I was always into lean girls (not anorexic) as a young guy, and I have affirmed to quite a few people (mostly guys) that, had I lived in Berlin back in my youth, I would have died early from heart trouble, as it continuously tried to pump blood to a lower extremity whenever I was within viewing range of the opposite sex. As young German women are not so well endowed as American girls, the German girls prefer going bra-less in summers. Several close guy friends wanted pictures, but I never could figure out how to snap those without being obvious — and probably arrested. Summers on the Berlin transit were wonderful.

  15. Miles_Teg says:

    A woman I worked with 30 years ago would often wear thin blouses with no bra to work. She was about 20 years past the stage when that might have looked good. Come to think of it I’m not sure she would have looked good when she was 20.

    The other women made sneering comments about her behind her back, the guys were thinking of taking up a collection and handing over the dough to her with the demand: “Buy some bras.”

  16. brad says:

    I expect lots of men size up women as Sexual partners, if only half-consciously. Most of us have better sense than to admit it…

  17. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Most of us have better sense than to admit it…

    Not me.

    Many years ago, Barbara and I were watching a video in which a woman appeared wearing an extremely low-cut dress. I commented, “I like her dress!” and that has since become my code phrase, even for women who are completely nekkid. (Well, in that case, it’s probably “I REALLY like her dress.”)

    But turn-about is fair play, and Barbara soon started commenting, “I like his dress”. The other night we watched something that had full frontal male nudity, and Barbara of course commented, “I REALLY like his dress.”

    And Barbara is perfectly aware that I love Amber Marshall, although I’ve never met her and she’s (presumably) happily married. Not “love” in the sense of “really, really like”, or even “find sexually attractive”. Love in the sense of I’d do anything for her. I’d help her bury a body, literally. Hell, I’d help her kill it first.

  18. OFD says:

    I doubt Amber has such a morbid turn of mind as thee.

    I’m beyond having the biological need to inseminate half the human race; especially when I consider the headaches that accompany the chains that bind us.

  19. SteveF says:

    I’m not beyond the need. It’s a constant pressure in the back of my head. It’s not even a sex drive, it’s specifically a reproduction drive. And when I encounter some jackass with six or ten kids, living at least partially on “aid”, I have more than a passing urge to kill him.

  20. OFD says:

    Well, young whippuh-snappuh, I daresay that pressure in your head may go away or subside by the time you reach my advanced state of decrepitude and decay, and also after a decade or so of dealing with a teenage daughter, who, at 21, still exhibits traces of that decade’s behavior.

    In my experience/observations, it ain’t the male half of the jackass couple that is still around with the multiple progeny; it’s the other half. The male done took off long ago, and at best/worst there may be or have been other males around for a while in the meantime but none who actually stay for the long haul, esp. as the female gets older and fatter and more miserable.

    My homicidal impulses are reserved for denizens who currently populate Mordor and the Bagel and who are running the country down the toilet as fast as their grubby, treasonous mitts will let them.

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