Zoo was, by turns, egregiously irritating and appallingly ridiculous. So, it was either boring or ludicrous. I preferred it when it was ludicrous.

Actually, they've just started covering it regularly. Last week, I think.

How is that different from any other Hawthorne story?

I've heard that Moby Dick has subversive, modernist humour. This surely must be exhibit A.

Pfft, whatever. Shave his beard, lighten his hair a couple of shades, and McElhatton's ready to play Vladimir Putin*. Make it so, Hollywood.

I just saw Moulin Rouge! on Friday. What a movie! What a spectacle! What drugs were being ingested by Baz Luhrmann? I loved it.

Exactly! Preach it!

You're smarter than I am. I SHOULD have walked out on Battlefield Earth, but my SO told me there was alien peen - turns out he gotten the aliens confused with the Centauri of Babylon 5. By the end, I got into hate watching it and calling out technical directions at the screen. NO ONE told me to shut it.

Preach …

So, I finally watched The Night Manager. Fun in places, slick throughout, tense, thrilling, about as deep as a single Kleenex. It seemed the sort of tale that could end up much bloodier than it turned out to be, which is okay.

And there's your mascot!

Radically, no. But it's distinctive. Looking at some recipes online, it appears that smoked meat rubs tend to include cloves. OTOH, there's a Serious Eats article directly comparing pastrami to smoked meat and they focus on other, albeit minor, distinctions: http://www.seriouseats.com/…

Pugilistic Poets was right there!

I confess to mistaking her for Gillian Anderson in the above pic.

There's a Montreal-style bagel purveyor in Seattle called Eltana - you need a different grip to hold a sandwich bagel from there, and sure, the open-faced lox is superior, but the smoked trout sandwich bagel is something I miss.

Really? Are you ordering the lean smoked meat? Because the spices accumulate in the fat.

I know people I can torture with this rendition.

Yeah.

We all did.

It's too late to participate now, but someone bought their own versions of the White House Easter eggs and sold them to 1) raise money for education and 2) castigate Trump's anti-public education policies.