The zippiness is back in my laptop after I factory reset it, but getting all the settings back in all the apps I use has been a pain, and email signatures and groups, and this bloody VS editor. The hint of fall in the air is making it harder for me to ignore the political shit happening in the world. All I can do is fly some flags.
Crime series are our favorite TV; just finished Bergerac. I hate the whole private tragedy inner life personal demons aspect that the writers seem obliged to put in the story. That is not the interesting part. It would be better if the detective had no private life, maybe just slept at the police station and worked all the time. And the detective should not have children. If the cop has a child in the first act, it will be kidnapped in the third act.
This odd scifi novel has independently existing destructive ideas (memes) that can erase themselves from memory and warp reality. Only once does it mention a meme-created cult, but I hoped it would explore that as well as society-wide forgetting as the source of cultural weirdness.

For a movie of its type (epic action fantasy), the Odyssey was probably well done; I don't have much to compare it with since blockbuster spectacles are not my thing. Saw it yesterday with friends who did not like it. I wanted to see it to complete the cultural experience we are having with the new Emily Wilson translation and all the online commentary including the tattooed British-American Wilson's scholarly panning of the film. I lined up the 3 or 4 translations at the library and invited people to compare the opening lines. This site shows six translations side by side. In Wilson's introduction, I learned that the Greek of the original is written in dactyllic hexameter, six dactyls per line. Her translation is in iambic pentameter. I looked to see if there were English poems written in dactylic hexameter and found Longfellow's Evangeline. Since Longfellow was a classics professor and he was writing a North American epic poem about the travails of separated lovers, he knew to elevate it by using the meter of the Greek classics. I'm pleased that the story of my ancestors got the epic treatment. This little Coleridge rhyme helps me remember meter:
   Trochee trips from long to short;
   From long to long in solemn sort
   Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
   Ever to come up with Dactyl's trisyllable.
   Iambics march from short to long.
   With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.