All Activity

I find their point of view simplistic and counterproductive myself, but I kinda try to understand why they might be that way. Many people have great difficulty understanding why anyone would disagree with them, because their point of view seems so obviously correct to them. I suspect that's because they've always looked at things from a certain angle, so it doesn't occur to them that the other person might be a very nice person who simply looks at things from a different angle -- or that someone might agree with them on most things, even though they look different, etc. Besides, it's probably human nature to distrust anyone who's not a member of your in-group. (That distrust would have had real survival value back when members of the neighboring tribe might be out to kill you.) Our parents may have encouraged us to ignore that feeling, or may have encouraged us to pay special attention to it. Some people can later overcome the training they had as a child, but it's neither automatic nor easy. If your mother's niece has seemed like a reasonable person in the past, you might try giving her another chance. Try to understand her point of view (which doesn't mean you have to agree), and explain your point of view to her.

I'm sorry your back is causing you such pain today, FL! (Please see the Moderator Comment that I added to your post.)

Well my mom and I have a row with my mom's niece. How that happened? Well, my niece is racist. Having some people close to her converting to the Islam, participating in the ramadan, choosing more modest clothes because those people met and fell in love with a Muslim made her bitter and racist. Instead of going like awww, the things people do for love. She was like Muslims are forcing their faith down or throat, as if the Christians didn't do the same thing for centuries. Guess she just doesn't understand love. So she was saying stuff like: "the culture of Muslims is R word, in front of my mother, who is remarried to a Muslim. Talk about being able to read the room, if my stephdad was there he would have left her alone in the restaurant with her steak, but my mother isn't like that. My niece eventually apologised to my mom and told her it wasn't meant to be personal and that my stephdad was welcome the next my mom would visit her, yeah.... not going to happen. I sent an angry text to her saying that the next time spouts racist bs me and my mom would leave, I told her she can shove her steak and called her a sour puss. I won't let anyone hurt my mother or insult my stephdad's religion. R word scoff, those people are moving haven and earth to help their fellow brethren in Marokko and Libië after disaster befell both countries, how are they R word? I will never understand racists.

Stupid effing female canine, how dare you? How dare you suggest that my backpain is just a little auwie and I need to try to work anyway?! I hope you have a hernia that takes seven months to cure, grow some effing empathy! Moderator Comment: This post sounds like it could replying to some other member's prior post, in which case it would be in clear violation of forum rules. Since there are no other recent posts on the subject of back pain, however, it's apparently "addressed" to someone in the member's everyday life. Let's all please remember to be very clear about this sort of thing -- for example, preface the above with something like "My boss is being really obnoxious today. I feel like telling her . . . ."

Actually those first two I saw virtually, too.

I've seen recordings of Coriolan, The Madness of George III and The Vote.

I've had the pleasure of seeing him a few times. Love him!

From that article: Have never had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Gatiss on stage, but I'm impressed!

Fabulous!

Mark Gatiss is the 2023 UK Theatre Awards recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre Award https://uktheatre.org/mark-gatiss-is-the-2023-uk-theatre-awards-recipient-of-the-outstanding-contribution-to-british-theatre-award/

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny There are a couple of interesting new characters, one being the now-adult daughter of an old colleague of Jones's. She's one of those basically good but not immune to money types that tend to crop up in Indy's universe. Also there's a cheeky mid-teens kid with amazing mechanical skills. This allows Jones (now around 80, albeit fit and healthy) to specialize in being the brains of the operation, at least when he can get the others to listen. Of course there's a powerful historical artifact being sought by evil forces, requiring intervention by Indy and crew on the side of (mostly) righteousness. The movie is set in the 1960s, consistent with how long it's been between the earlier Jones movies and this one. But a number of scenes are set years earlier, with a younger Jones. I thought boy they sure have good makeup, but it turns out they used a younger actor with a CGI face -- very convincingly done! The cast includes John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in LotR), Toby Jones (Culverton Smith in "The Lying Detective" and Dobby the house elf in the Harry Potter movies), and Mads Mikkelsen (brother of Lars Mikkelsen, who played Charles Augustus Magnussen in Sherlock's 3rd series). All in all, I enjoyed it, but being a recently made movie, it has the requisite amount of loud noise (including music) that often made the dialog hard for me to hear, so I had trouble following the plot at times. Hoping the DVD will have subtitles!

Actually it's the aphid larvae that eat leaves, and the ladybug larvae that eat the aphid larvae. I've seen it happen on my nasturtiums -- though not quite as soon as I was hoping.

Yeah, right!

I hadn't actually thought much about it before, but it suddenly occurred to me a while back that roughly half of what I'd been calling lady bugs all my life were actually gentleman bugs! I suspect, though, that the "lady" part of "lady bug" and "lady bird" refers not to the beetle's supposed sex, but rather to the Virgin Mary, who seems to have some connection with those beetles in Scandinavian and Germanic countries as well. Added: the internet seems to agree. Apparently aphids had been destroying crops, and after the farmer prayed to Mary for help, the little spotted beetles came and ate the aphids.

Just stating the obvious!

It's Mary's Beetle in German, btw.

You might luck into a PBS broadcast or find the DVDs at your library. The show is a hit for ITV and a fourth season has been commissioned and is probably shooting as I write. I notice that most of these detective shows that go on location tend to shoot in the summer months. S3 was supposed to have 4 episodes but I only see 3 listed. Either the last episode got delayed or it got scrapped altogether. The second season was interrupted by Covid and may have also affected the schedule for the following year. I wouldn’t call it a necessary purchase but seeing Jason Watkins as Dodds is not to be missed. Tala Gouveia said there was some pushback against the show being too woke because she, black woman of Portuguese descent was cast as the lead. Technically Watkins is the star, even though his character defers to hers. More woke than a black DCI is a gay Detective Superintendent who is obliged to mention’my husband’ in every scene he’s in. Bath is on the bucket list. It makes a refreshing change from London.

Sounds like a good premise for an entertaining show. Maybe I'll spring for the DVDs one of these days. Amazon (US) has them, so I assume they're also available in the UK for people like me who A] don't have high-speed internet service, and/or B] want a copy that they can rely on re-watching years and years from now.

Recent discovery and the reason I finally broke down and signed up for BritBox… MCDONALD AND DODDS Starring Jason Watkins and Tala Gouveia If you watch Netflix’s The Crown, you may recognize Jason Watkins as PM Harold Wilson in Season 3. His part was not huge, but his scenes with Elizabeth (Olivia Coleman) were a highlight of the season for me. So I was delighted to hear that Jason continues in work as the co-lead(he takes first billing) Opposite newcomer Tala Gouveia. The show is up to its third season, but the runs are brief, only two or three episodes each. So it didn’t take long to catch up. Watkins demonstrates his character actor prowess as he inhabits a completely different character here in both looks and manner to Harold Wilson. Indeed, so different is he that unless you recognize his name, you might not know he’s the same guy. Ambitious high-flyer Lauren McDonald left the London Met for the picturesque spa city of Bath In order to take a promotion to DCI. She is very young for the post, and anxious to prove herself. She gets assigned mild mannered socially awkward Detective Sergeant Dodds (no first name given) Who has been riding a desk and out of the field for the past 11 years. The top brass hope to get the new DCI to encourage Dodds to take early retirement by showing him he can’t handle field work any more. DS Dodds surprises everyone, including his DCI by being a quiet quirky deducing machine, with a specialty in research and a prodigious ability to absorb new information fast. McDonald is the mouth and the extrovert bluster fronting this team, but Dodds is the brain and the soul of deduction. This partnership is what Conan Doyle’s might’ve looked like if Holmes and Watson had switched personalities—and if one of them was a woman. In an already overstuffed genre field, this show distinguishes itself with its inventive casting and its gorgeous location—Bath has not been featured before in a detective drama. The tone is more akin to Midsomer Murders than Inspector Morse or Vera. I felt that the 90-minute running time per episode was too long, as the cases didn’t have enough heft to warrant that length. So there was a lot of extraneous padding which made for slow going at times. I think the show might have been slightly more successful as a 60 minute drama, allowing for six episodes per season rather than three. I would definitely enjoy seeing more opportunities for DS Dodds to flex his stuff.

… and probably in one piece. 😄

P.S. As someone mentioned earlier, A Confession reunited Martin with ‘Mike Stamford’ (David Nellist) who plays Steve Fulcher’s DI, and advises him that he’s making a terrible mistake. Happier times by far in the St. Barts lab.

Thanks -- interesting interview, and nice photo of Moffat (credited to Louis Oliver, his son). This quote caught my attention: "People are always going on at me about out of sequence narrative, but what is the right order to tell a story?" The only time that habit of his actually bothered me was in "The Empty Hearse," with Sherlock filling Anderson in on "how he did it" between bits of Sherlock's scene with John in the bomb train. I'm tentatively agreeing with Anderson there -- why would Sherlock tell Anderson, of all people? So perhaps being "out of sequence" is our clue that the tell-all actually took place in Anderson's imagination. He's no dummy, though, so he probably got pretty close to the truth. I was about to say that they put Sherlock's "high-functioning sociopath" line in the wrong episode -- but they were right, and I was merely thinking about the time he repeated it in "Sign of Three." "Dr Watson always kind of has been the person to whom the story happens." That's obvious in the original stories, what with Watson being the narrator. But Martin Freeman does a marvelous job of being the more-or-less normal guy in the story, reacting much as we might in his shoes, and thereby providing a good deal of the humor, as well as keeping Sherlock (more or less) in line.

It is so clever what they do, how they link it to Holmes and Watson and remind us how important that first story is.

I thought it might be something like that -- thanks for confirming! I won't ask for more, even though I'm curious what they make of the interminable back story -- as you say, no spoilers!

Only four years late to the party, but I finally watched “A Confession”. I recently signed up for BritBox. Solid work by MF as the lead of this gritty procedural drama based on a true-crime case in the UK a decade ago. MG plays Wiltshire detective superintendent Steve Fulcher whose unorthodox methods in coaxing a confession from a suspect accused of abducting a young woman have long-reaching ramifications for his career and the public perception of police conduct. DS Fulcher lost his reputation over the case, and resigned his commission, becoming a security contract advisor in the Middle East. I couldn’t help drawing comparisons between this detective and Dr. Watson. I asked myself whether if John Watson had chosen to become a police detective rather than an army surgeon, would he likely have taken the same course of action which Steve Fulcher did—Pursuing justice even though it meant breaking the letter of the law and putting his own career in jeopardy? I could only conclude that yes, he would, particularly after having apprenticed with Sherlock Holmes.