I finished the excruciating clips show last night and was rewarded by the discovery that it was, in fact, the last episode of the season and not the second last! *** SPOILER ALERT *** Riker is cured of rabies.

I don’t expect everyone to enjoy the muggy heat of summer as much as I do. But why does every store have to have its A/C set so cold? If you don’t like July, fine, take the edge off if you absolutely have to. But don’t turn it into November!

Another week of Cocteau movie nights: Ruy Blas, and 8 x 8 A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements. These were as far removed as possible from each other, the first a big studio movie in which Cocteau delivers 90 minutes of exposition that still aren’t enough for me to follow what is going on, and the other, a bunch of top…

I’m continuing through the second season of Star Trek Next Gen. I just finished an episode in which a civilisation is forced to decide the method of its own extermination: either by lack of genetic diversity, or by intermarriage with the Irish. Unfortunately, I watched this alone, so I wasn’t able to immediately…

Too much traveling this week, too much work just to lie around somewhere different. Movie nights went off as usual: Le baron fantome, and La Belle et la Bete. I live for this hot, muggy weather. Movie nights while the fan is humming are the best movie nights.

Movie nights for the next month or so will be all Jean Cocteau. It’s too bad he made so few movies, he just had too many preoccupations and too many correspondences. If he were alive today, he’d waste all his time on Twitter and Facebook, he’d get nothing done.

I spent my movie nights this week with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Sunflower, and Marcello alone in Casanova ‘70. Casanova was exactly the ridiculous sex comedy I was expecting. Sunflower, though, was emotionally exhausting! There aren’t many actors who can so easily get me invested in their…

This was a really excellent week! The sun was shining but for one day, and even that day was a proper hot windy downpour that blew through the house and took with it six months of cold and gloom! What a difference just a rush of wind can make! Also, finally, lilacs everywhere!

Gloom usually doesn’t effect me, but this year it has gone on two months longer than usual. Gloom plus a lingering damp North Atlantic cold. And I’m naturally cold anyway, I’m a walking icicle, it has to get beastly hot out before I even stop shivering. So I envy your heat! I dream of the jungle or the desert. Dry…

I started the week with the promise of new beginnings by opening my long neglected extra giant Easter Kinder Egg. Unfortunately, I got the same prize that I got with the first one: a hoverbike. These entrails surely meant another week of miserable weather ahead.

I usually listen to podcasts while cooking, and the problem I have is constantly having to pause while I’m running the sink, or the blender or anything too noisy. And since my hands in the kitchen will invariably be wet or covered in flour or something, I have to stop each time to make sure one finger is completely…

Things are actually fine with me! But lack of sunshine and warmth for half-years at a time is just not healthy in any way. But it is an excuse to sleep in on weekends, so I shouldn’t complain. Thank you, though!

I’m drifting aimlessly through this cold, rainy, miserable Spring. I haven’t the will anymore to even select a movie so I just let my movie nights be chosen for me. Twice this week I collapsed lifelessly in a heap pointed more or less at the screen and watched the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, neither of…

He’s always been Basil Nosebone to me, he has an excellent nose.

I celebrated a rainy Victoria Day evening with Renoir’s Marseillaise and a giant yellow pyrex bowl of Hawkins Cheesies. I highly recommend both. When you’re taking cheesies into a fleece nest of pillows you need a really heavy bowl to reduce the risk of upset. Another trick to managing dangerously dyed snacks is…

Very busy week. Only time for one movie night, another Sherlock Holmes: Terror by Night. This one took place on a train. Trains were so swanky back then! This is a problem of growth-based economies: in order to simulate growth, all the little niceties get stripped away, little by little, year after year. And now…

I’m watching them off a set of DVDs that I was given about ten years ago along with the original series. Its taken me this long to get here, but I am finally quickening my pace to nearly two episodes a week! I was certain I had seen all of Next Gen before in repeats, but nothing so far is familiar to me. Maybe I had…

The Piscopo episode was followed by the 80s Blow-Dried Hair Guy who Negotiates For Peace by Having Enemies Come Together By Learning Sign Language episode. In general, I prefer optimistic episodes, but there’s optimism and then there’s just plain stupid. Yikes. Its going to be a long, cold summer before I get to the…

More Sherlock Holmes. The Woman in Green and Pursuit to Algiers. The Woman in Green broke from the formula to which I had become accustomed, it was strangely melancholy. Also, why all the pointedly colour titles in a B&W series?

Another week of Sherlock Holmes movie nights: The Pearl of Death, and The House of Fear. The movies are at this point fairly interchangeable, I’m having a hard time telling them apart even as I’m watching them. But they’re interchangeable in a good, reliable way.