Jack Taylor - Review: In a word - it's a no.

I watched some of the first episode. It obviously has some Irish input, set in Galway, all nice & believable. The "hero" is as bad or worse than most villians with little or no sense of responsibility, and you're supposed to like him just because he has a grin. 5 minutes in he hits the Taoiseach (= Prime Minister). In reality, the cops here would get 4 of them together, beat him to a pulp and 'fix him up' (=frame him) for something that had him doing time behind bars. Getting fired out of the police here is an achievement, like getting fired from the civil service in most countries.

I'd give it 0/5 for plot, 4/5 the setting/local characters, and 1/5 for reality and "would these things happen in the real world?" I hate things where bad is made to look good.

The Season 4 finale makes me wonder the same thing. I'm almost burned out from all the police procedurals but that is great series.

Watching Stars Wars 10 this morning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cen-yPSEOiE

The Wind and the Lion was required watching on Parris Island before being shipped overseas.
We jarheads liked it. After doing bend and thrusts in the rose garden.
Our mind sets were locked and loaded warriors then.

Understand if one does not like it.

Parris Island?

I watched some Jack Taylor a while ago. Forgot all about it til you mentioned it. Yeah, no.

Just finished this miniseries:
Efterforskningen (The Investigation)
A police procedural in the purest sense. The story, the plot, completely revolves around it, it is not about the deed, not about the perpetrator (he doesn't appear at all).*
Nevertheless it is captivating and constantly suspenseful (if a bit slow), a crime story well told - and a true story at that.

* I wish I could say the same about Kim Wall's wikipedia page which is the perfect example of how you shouldn't do it.

Sorry I asked.

Hugo Award Winners

Some are books, but some are shows. Anyone scraped for them yet? One of them might be worth watching. Or maybe I've just given someone an idea …

Fixed the link. Thanks for the hint, I will take a good look at those.

My Christmas recommendations:
🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄
A Quiet Night In
Somehow black British humor is part of the holidays, I think.
If you need a change from Dinner For One, I highly recommend this little film to you.
A half-hour masterpiece in which only one sentence is spoken. High precision slapstick in finest silent film tradition!
A granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin also has a role.
It's part of a series, episode 2 of the first season. There's six seasons so far. BBC.
🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄
Justified
This is great Wild West entertainment beamed into the 21st century, into rural Kentucky. A gunslinging Marshal, Hillbilly crackheads, bankrupt minimng companies, Detroit Mafia, Mexican Mafia and Miami Mafia.
An old-fashioned sense of honor, broken promises, beautiful women, black people, whores ...
If I had to take this seriously I would hate the pro gun attitude, sexism and racism in it, but it's a great story, great imagery. More violent family saga than crime story.
Great entertainment, bingeworthy.
🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄🌟🎄


Happy Holidays!

[QUOTEondoho]Fixed the link. [/QUOTE]

Sorry, was it broken?

I wish to amend my review of Burn Notice.

Seasons 1-4 seem OK, up to a point. In Season 5, what little plot sense there was seems to get flushed down waste disposal. Characters are introduced or twisted whose chief function is turned to arguing against to everything the "hero" wants to accomplish. Any little common sense "the hero" had shown goes missing. What little sense of direction there was vanishes, plots make no sense and by series 6 you're seriously killing brain cells.

Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks was relatively good. I'd rather have the book, personally, because they ran out of film time before they ran out of plot, so they just skipped loads of the actually interesting stuff (below). They should have cut much of the early script which only seemed to show they were normal guys with wives who worried themselves sick while their husbands were earning their medals.

I remember seeing or hearing somewhere that there are (in engineering gobbledygook) 7 moments of movement on the earth, and these guys had only accounted for 6, and had great trouble as a result. It was curious also to see a slide rule. Anyone remember those? The first calculators were out in 1969. One of the rich kids at my school (which I left in 1970) was given a primitive Citizen handheld in final year, costing ≅£200(GBP). It was extremely basic. My brother was doing real engineering math, and he used a slide rule. They were actually ingenious, could do logs and all sorts of stuff if you read the instructions.

Just watched Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story. He was very faithful to the stage play in making his movie, putting a "stage-like feel" into the design and the subsequent re-use of a small number of locations. He added only one song – the Puerto Rican "national" anthem. Made only slight changes to the characterization. Excellent casting choices. Musical values of course superb.

I have a small collection of slide rules, and my dad taught me a lot about using them. He said that he knew of many mechanical engineers who preferred to use them because it let them "feel" the solutions to their problems: these were very "touchy feely" people. And, slide rules provided enough digits of accuracy to be good-enough.

When you set up an engineering problem in a computer today, "numbers will dutifully come right out," even if you made a mistake and the numbers are pure garbage. Spreadsheets have also in like manner cost many companies a lot of money. I can no longer count the number of reports that I have "repaired" for one client or another. Their users only realized that something was wrong when the results of two reports were inconsistent – then they had no idea which one was right, and quite often neither of them were.

One of the skills I was taught was estimating - arriving at a ballpark figure. A good estimate is ±10%, and if you go through the exercise, wrong answers will stand out.

I had a slide rule in the 1970s. I only gave it away when it became irrelevant. Do you still use the slide rules?

Old Boy by Spike Lee.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321511/