I really didn't intend to sweep everyone under one rug. And fuck me, I am only presuming that the American Gods show is focusing on "people from Latin America" (your term), based on the dialogue I've heard in previews and casting choices. The story is about the "original immigrants" — gods from a host of different cultures, so even even if the main characters are from the Norse pantheon, multiculturalism is a major part of the whole thing. If the shoe is anything like the book and stories, it will include Arabic, Hindu, Crimean, and South African characters, mythologies and cultural histories, among others.

I apologize if what I said was insulting or dismissive in ANY way.

Though just to be clear, when I was in school I took a graduate course in cultural social work, and (because generalist MSW courses are often terrible) we studied racial and cultural designations. For better or worse, "Latino/a" was the recommended term.

Not passing the buck on my poor cultural literacy, but I am definitely deflecting part of the blame to the American academic system.

No Offense season 2
Portlandia season 7

no prob. no offense taken. just sharing info about my little island imperialist colony.

the latest ALways Sunny was funny. I also watched the second waterpark episode again. too funny.

Me and the wife have been watching Cheers on Netflix. Also about 4 eps into new Black Mirror season. creepy as all fuck.

The newest Sherlock season was real hit or miss. I do not think Sherlock did any detective work whatsoevere. fucking tedious. The showrunners wrote all the episodes this last season and they made it much more like a superhero movie like the shit shit shit jude law and robert downey jr sherlock films, where he also does not detective work and is somehow a master MMA fighter in 1880's England....

@ severian - nobody is blaming you man.

just explaining is all.

the first time i came to the us is the first time i had to pick a racial label for myself. seriously. i don't know what my "race" is.

i often refuse these nazi categorizations & checkmark "other" and in the blank space write "human".

if there's money in it i'll take the label though ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa

Well, a litter of mongrel puppies is what "American" means too, though a little over half the population is really into forgetting all about that.

Actually, I think the same is true of a lot of cultures and "races." In that same godawful cultural S.W. class, we did some lineage tracing to prove some point that now escapes me. By all accounts from my family, and even, ultimately, in the class, I'm close to being of 100% Irish. But if going back a bit, I see that I had a great-great-grandmother who married the son of an Italian whose mother was half Greek. In Ireland. But I'm "Irish." And — funnily enough — the Irish people I've met tell me that if I were to say that in Ireland, I'd be lauhed out of the pub.

See.. now I'm remembering that we were essentially using Ancestry.com for accredited graduate coursework, which is of course obscenely stupid. So if you ever hear me bitching again about how I wish I'd stayed in grad school, do me a favor and remind me of this.

EDITED TO ADD:
In all fairness, that class was an elective. I had much better teachers and far fewer mind-numbingly stupid assignments in my program work.

I try to write in Human as well...

"race' is such a holdover concept from the white patriarchy supremacy mindset. it needs to be discarded. we are all one species.

no one is 100% anything. NO ONE. even the most inbred British royal family dipshit has a radical mix of shit in their DNA. Fuck, the "royal" family of assholes that England loves to suck ass on are fucking FRENCH!!!!!!!!!!! FRENCH!!!!!!!!!!

No they're not. If anything they're German, but not French.

Sunny was funny.

Re: Sherlock.
I've heard the same things. It's all Moffat's doing. He's done great things on Doctor Who, against all odds (he was tasked with following David Tennant's franchise-saving 10th Doctor after all, so I think he's done pretty well on the whole.) But honestly, he tries to make Doctor Who a bit too "superhero-y" at times too. And Doctor Who kind of already IS a superhero, so it should take some serious misuses of canonical character attributes to make it seem like "too much," and yet...

Anyway, the RDJ/Jude Law movies were a product of their time. "Gritty," violent origin story reboots were in vogue back then. Unfortunately, I think the wonderful Batman Begins is to blame, however unintentionally.
Batman Begins begat Casino Royale begat "dark" Sherlock the American kickboxer begat JJ Abrams' Star Trek begat JJ Abrams' Star Wars. It was the best and worst of times for gritty reboots. I think the movies are OK for a larf, but as a fan of Doyle's stories, I can't in good conscience stomach their existence.

Sherlock (BBC) seemed a fitting antidote to that for the first 2 seasons. But I've heard tons of people say exactly what you're saying about the new eps, and that's a damn shame. I hear they cast the guy who played Dr. Zola in Captain America as the villain. Oi.

Loved the "Moriarty" character though. Forget the name of the guy who played the part, but he was excellent. ALTHOUGH, to be entirely fair, that character had Heath Ledger Joker syndrome pretty fucking bad. He was great, but the writers were definitely going for THAT kind of vibe. So maybe the show's been harboring superhero aspirations the whole time.

(Fun fact: That guy who played Moriarty was also in SPECTRE, the unnecessary third sequel to the aforementioned "gritty" Batman Begins-influenced 007 reboot. And Benedict is Doctor Strange... AND Khan... so these reboot factories are clearly all dipping into the same pool.

new Sherlock. Just a bunch of trying to be way too clever. Sort of like a Black Mirror spin off. Vapid, I blame Mark Gatiss, he's OK in the role, but the writing is pretty poor. On the Sherlock movies, I disagree, I think that the Guy Ritchies are pretty entertaining, the visuals are fantastic, esp Game of Shadows. The pre ww1 German army with the forest shelling scene!
Eddie Marsan is great in them as Lestrade, and I like Stephen Fry better as Mycroft than Gatiss, and Jared Harris better as Moriarity.

From a social science perspective, "race," though certainly an antiquated concept, can have a positive influenc on self-realization and cultural identity. I think a lot of people, even the most progressive, would shun the idea of abandoning "race" if they were asked to do it themselves. I'm not quite sure we're "there" yet. People have a surprising amount of effect-blindness to the negative results of viewing the world in terms of in- and out-groups... in the sense that they see how racial identity can unite, but inexplicably don't seem to see how it can divide. This is true of most people all over the world.

Right now, we're at an evolutionary impasse with regard to this stuff. Most sane people openly admonish segregation when it's imposed, but their own mental schemas of the world are still built on principles of categorization, classification and segregation. They don't want it to be forced upon them physically, but they want to engage in it cognitively and perceptually.

I don't think "we" have the capacity for understanding necessary to surpass this tendency yet. Until we do, I don't think we'll be ready for a "post-race" society.

More likely, it will be a slow brute force act of evolution that wipes out race-centric thinking. Nature will do it, because it's smarter than we are. When everyone has procreated with everyone else so much that racial divisions become imperceptible, then we'll have a fighting chance. Until then, I fear our own limited minds will prevent us from engaging, and sometimes delighting in, this grotesque practice of human taxonomy.

You mention the royal family. Yeah. As long enter countries bow to families for no reason other than their purity, breeding and lineage, things are going to stay ridiculous.

speaking of waht are you watching on tv, you-know-who is on tv right now and im 100% avoiding it. i just can't fucking look.

yes. YES! They tried to make sherlock be Black Mirrori-ish, where the audience is left disturbed. I dont read sherlock or watch sherlock to be disturbed. I want to see deductive reasoning.

at one point, fucking sherlock says he is going to "warm up" by solving crimes that people send him on twitter or text or something, and they show a montage with barely legible texts asking sherlock to solve something and he solves like 20 of them just from the texts and sitting there with his fucking MAGIC. I hated it. fucking blasphemous.

the guy ritchie movies could have been about any fucking asshole. To just tag on the name of Sherlock was pathetic.

Bennie Cumberbatch is getting way too much work. He's the Breetesh version of Joseph Gordon Levett.

He's been in an obscene number of franchisey adaptations at this point. Star Trek, The Hobbit (first ludicrously unnecessary sequel), The Hobbit (second ludicrously unnecessary sequel), Star Trek, Doctor Strange/MCU, Sherlock...

He's not the British Joseph Gordon Levitt. He's the British fucking Gerard Butler!! Or something. I don't know. Trying to think of some non-British wank who's been in more franchise films. Tom Cruise?

Wait... no... he's the British Harrison Ford!!! The younger, more skilled, less cool, less attractive, deep-voices Harrison motherfuckin' Ford!

Also, I like Joseph Gordon Levitt. And I don't get out to many movies, but I don't think he gets that much work. Does he? Anyway, he's ok by me.

the last tv character JGL did was the old man from 3rd rock from the sun i think. he's not in too many things is he?

whereas frumious bandersnatch has been in all kinds of garbage including one terrible british miniseries about... government espionage or something. awful. he's smaug (good), he's khan (not good), he's sherlock (good), he's alan turing (hmmm....), he's everybody and their mother. getting overexposed. as long as he keeps the money he should be fine though. cash in while you can.

---

finished saul season 2. so very satisfying

now started mr. robot season 2, and i'm liking it. please don't be a dick and avoid spoilers of any kind. any kind. any kind. any kind. of any kind. any. any kind. no spoilers.thank you.

I actually quite liked him as Khan. Not as Khan because he is not Ricardo Montalban and he didn't even attempt to re-create that character. But as an alternate universe/timeline version of what Khan might have been? Purty good. I recently rewatched that one, and there's nothing wrong with it. And if anyone should be pissed about a non-Khan it's me (Wrath of Khan = one of the greatest movies ever made by anyone period.)

As Smaug? Meh. All of those movies were pretty meh. Yeah he's got a good voice. Probably one of the better parts of the movie(s).

I thought he was great as Turing. Or really I thought The Imitation Game was great. As Turing he basically just played gay, non-opiate raddled Sherlock. But it was a good movie. I liked it quite a bit.

the terrible british series about government espionage wasn't imitation game but something called the last... the last enemy or something. government spying on civilians and some terrorism subplot. each chapter even has some sort of earnest introduction by some actor.

it's complete shit. watch it if you can lol. awful!

the turing movie was so-so. turing's story itself is great, just the movie as a finished product didn't do it for me--had a hallmark movie of the week flavor to it. his khan of the future, i'm sorry but montalbán owns that forever. i blame jj abrams from it though.

anyway, frumious b. is great though-- he really is a good actor. also appears to be a very decent person IRL. i have no complaints about him. i was just commenting on his ubiquity vs. that of the much less visible don jon.

mr. robot season 2 just introduced a cop to the proceedings.

i'm not sure i like this becoming another cop show derivative.

they'd better not

I enjoyed Mr R S2, it's been a bit on the confusing side, though,

I'm watching Show Me a Hero, Oscar Issac. Pretty well put together, he's a new city councilor in Yonkers NY during the late 80's. Federal desegregation order and low income housing background. It's really well done. Alfred Molina shows his skills in this

he's got multiple personalities and he hallucinates like a momforto so yeah it's hard to track all the plots & counterplots

i should check out that show you mention!

Haha... Bandersnatch!

Sorry, I just caught that.

Did you know there was a band by that name? From... you guessed it... San Fran in the '60s.

ha ha ha ha

you're the first person to get it, ever-- or at least to mention i. my brain just can't avoid it.

didn't know about the hippies!

Impossible, especially given the frequency with which the word has been used in other media. Wasn't there just a movie based on Through the Looking Glass? There was a detective novel (one I've never read) called "The Frumious Bandersnatch" as well.

Anyway, just to make sure you know I do indeed "get it" ...

When I was little, I had an illustrated edition of the Jabberwocky (just the poem), and my mom read it to me every night. :)

from memory, so may not be perfect

"He took his vorpal sword in hand
Long time the maxim foe he sought
And rested he by the jubjum tree
And stood a while in thought
And as he stood, the jabberwock with eyes of flame
Came whistling through the fulgy woods and burbled as it came
And one, two and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack
And left it dead and with it's head he went galumphing back
"'And thou has slain the jabberwock?
Oh come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Of frumious day, calloo callay" he chortled in his joy.
Twas brillig and the slighthy toves
Did gyre and gimbal in the wabes
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the momes rathgrabed."

yes ha ha ha

i meant the wordplay/rhyme thing

the inevitable cumberbatch-bandersnatch link

i can't not think it

====

so, been catching up with HOUSE OF LIES season 5

it's still entertaining and funny after all these years

perfect for the cynical season-- although spring is near

Ahaa! Yes!

I always remembered it as "Frabtious day, calloo callay" but, I know that's not right. Still, I've been known to recite that (falsely) when something sweet happens in my life... even "he chortled in his joy."

Now this is sappy, but my mother used to call "beamish boy" from time to time. I didn't mind. :)

Warning: nobody EVER watch the 100.

I know it has an inexplicable 90% rotten tomatoes rating (no fucking clue how that happened, as it's simply shit) ... but don't even think it.

maybe you've heard people compare it to LOST, the greatest show of our generation. Still! Don't do it!

It is exactly like LOST, only with spaceships instead of airplanes, bunkers instead of hatches, and with a terrible young adult cast that makes it feel like 90210. So despite all the countless things it rips off from LOST, it's ultimately the anti-LOST. It's as if LOST's loser juvenile delinquent little brother knocked up the Hunger Games and made a shame baby that was raised by the CW.

Don't ask me how I know this. It's not a story I care to tell. But dear god, heed me! Especially if you love lost -- oh, sweet Desmond, what have they done to you? -- stay as far away from this show as you physically can.

You having a giraffe?!

ok, out of the blue im catching up with Better Call Saul. half of the first season got me hooked. second season I missed out but, im hoping Netflix will offer it right when the 3rd season is airing. they normally do this right? Gus might make an appearance I read. los pollos.

I'm not having anything, except a good darn time! ;)

Seriously though, LOST is awesome. It's a great show. Great, great, great. Regular basic cable television has not seen that level of awesomeness since.

Maaayyyybe there have been some as-good offerings in the years since, but every one I can think of has had the benefit of being on a cable or premium network, or subscription service, where they can get away with more (blood, swearing, sex, drugs).

Breaking Bad — tremendous, of course.
Also I've never seen The Wire, so... yeah.

PROMISING!!! First episode sets things up for a slow burning freak show. Love Tom Hardy.

Has anyone seen the Young Pope? And would they recommend it?

you should - it's brilliant.

My Sheridan Animation 2005 graduating class of classical animation and faculty interview on our student films DVD is strictly non-commercial.

I don't know how you saw it Wayne, but if someone posts it on youtube it needs to be taken down. My class could get hurt! :(

Is that on already?

I have HBO, so I'll check it out and get back to you. Looks absolutely grotesque to me, probably tons of black-hearted fun.

finished mr. robot season 2 which was FUCKING GREAT. dark as fuck and all, and sure maybe more than a bit preposterous, it's certainly no the wire, but it was good.

now fixin' to finish house of cards season 5 which so far has been funny and entertaining and i don't tire of the schtick