a desultory little bath

Google's AI is always trying to help out by automatically generating animations, and while some of them are hilariously off, it's hard to go wrong with pet videos. The source of this animation was all Snookums washing his belly with his feet sticking out in this weird position. The AI was set up for success because every single bit of the video was fairly good.

Golden Age detective fiction: Josephine Tey

Last year I read a couple of books by Josephine Tey, best known (in the words of Wikipedia) for "The Daughter of Time (1951) (voted greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990)". That's the book where a fictional detective stuck in the hospital investigates Richard III and determines he was innocent of being a murderer (of the boys in the tower) etc, which was based on scholarly writings already known in the field (the field of Richard III, not the field of popular crime writing). It was a good read, and part of what makes it strike people as a good mystery is probably the ways in which it is very much unlike a typical detective mystery, although of course there are memorable examples of Holmes and Poirot solving cases while stuck away from the scene through intermediaries they send to do their bidding, and Miss Marple made it quite a habit in The Thirteen Problems.

Anyway, along with it I read Brat Farrar as well, which I agree with Wax is a good example of its type of mystery but it didn't blow me away, and The Man in the Queue, which is a memorably well-plotted and -premised example of the mid-century British (police) detective story. The events and clues as they unfold after the memorable premise of the seemingly untraceable and unremarkable victim who appears in a queue outside a theater to be killed in the middle of a crowd without anybody noticing anything makes for an extraordinary plot, and the narration has its charms.

So I remembered the amazing premise and twisty plot of this book when I rediscovered it on my ereader app but I couldn't remember the end or why I hadn't liked it and had decided afterwards not to read any more Josephine Tey, so out of curiosity I reread the beginning and skimmed the rest. As is so often the case with mystery and crime fiction the answer was ( sexism! )

Star Trek and Discovery and dippiness, non-spoilery

I feel ridiculous just typing these words because Star Trek has always been philosophically pretty dippy, but like... Discovery seems to be going dippier?

Like, previous Star Treks were very earnest and occasionally it would indulge in stopping on a peak for a Bruckheimer shot with some dramatic lighting and quote some literature (that they would stop to tell us was super old and how it's so weird that they still know about it).

But this new show has not only replaced the log entry soundclips with voiceovers that typically skip straight to overly-emotive, like, poetry and suddenly talking about the human condition or whatever in a voice throbbing with passion and it's like... oh, so this character is ALSO one of those dramatic people from parties that I always meet and am like "That's right, people like this don't only exist in books; why are they so exhausting, and how can they live like this?"

Right, pardon. Not only that, but they also keep just falling into Meaningful Emotional Conversations that make me remember all the jokes & anecdotes my Philosophy for Social Science majors lecturer told us about what it was like to teach Philosophy for Psychology majors.

Don't get me wrong, there were always plenty of characters in each show who would earnestly have written and/or declaimed the kinds of speeches that keep grabbing my attention in Discovery, but the space devoted to that tended to be limited to comfortable-for-me levels, and I usually didn't have time to do more than a brief chuckle at the cheesiness or a couple of sentences of saying "Hey, that metaphor doesn't work at all..." back to the TV before the Captain's Log or whatever would fade out and the action would start.

These voiceovers are going all in on the poetry, landing just shy of Madeline Bassett levels, and sometimes the rest of the stuff going on (like the plot and the dialogue and stuff!) comes across strongly enough to let me tune it out, but other times it goes on for long enough for me to mentally start keeping that habitually scathing list of all the dippy fallacies committed which has become automatic after a childhood in a Unitarian Universalist congregation (and in the car with my cynical parents on the way home taking turns saying "Oh PLEASE"). If she's feeling uncharitable, my wife might tell you that this list isn't entirely mental. I have a low tolerance for voiceover narration in general, and combined with the dippiness and my no-doubt genetic predisposition to talk back to audio[and/or]visual entertainment... well. She might be considering ways to watch without me soon at this rate.