Wednesday Morning

I forgot to wake Pop at eight for his big lunch at the Seniors’ Center. He is up in plenty of time, though. Since he is likely to be gone for some hours, I think I will take the occasion to knock that shave out of the way.

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1300

Did it! I suppose I look a little less like a bum with serious criminal propensities, but it is such an unrewarding chore: to have that ugly face looking back at you in the mirror, a face that no girl would want to kiss, a face you cannot really stand looking at, a face that might inspire pity but never love.

HBO-Amazon

HBO has forged an exclusive long-term licensing deal with Amazon's streaming service Prime Instant Video, making it the exclusive online-only subscription home for hundreds of hours of HBO programming including all episodes of classic series The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire and Six Feet Under and movies and miniseries such as John Adams, Band of Brothers and Angels in America.

-- ONTD

Since I already have access to HBO Go, you would think this should not mean anything to me. But it does. It would seem that I am too lazy to log in on yet another website. Though, part of the problem is that I keep falling out of love with streaming shows and movies online. However, this announcement reminded me that "The Wire" is on HBO, and I have been interested in catching this much hyped series for a long time, and I am definitely going to have to give that series a run.

Nina Zero

We’re at about the end of the story, and Nina is getting ready to give herself up to the law. Right now, she is having a rough night, sleeping in her truck in the rough part of town.

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I woke sometime after midnight … couldn’t get back to sleep. I got out of the truck, walked the back streets and alleys. I could sense guys on the street watching me, thinking a young woman all alone here this time of night, easy target. But I wasn’t afraid. It was a weird feeling, walking down bad streets in the dead of night, not being afraid. After all the times I was terrified some guy was going to come after me, of being a walking target because of what I got between my legs. It was the fear that once bothered me most, the constant wondering if this was when the beast was going to roar out of the shadows to rip me up. I fantasized this would be the moment the beast came. I saw him spring from the alley darkness, I said, “You want a little of what I got?” Then I’d whip out the revolver, and after, his voice would come out a couple octaves higher, if it came out at all.

-- “Shooting Elvis” by Robert M. Eversz

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Pop and Amazon

Pop winces and cries out a little over the Amazon bill with its charge for Amazon Prime. I am glad we have secured another year under the program. It’s a help - saving me the costs of shipping and handling and giving me faster delivery. I’m not very big into video-streaming at the moment, but I like having the option. Since I have a little cash, I offered to kick in twenty dollars for the charge, but he was generous enough to decline. One can think of it as my consolation for not getting to eat at Furr’s anymore, with that honor going to his lady friends. I guess I can understand that.

Shakespeare's Birthday

Four-hundred-and-fifty years ago today, in a village in the West Midlands, the greatest imaginative intelligence evolved by our species was born. Lawrence Olivier called Shakespeare "the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God". John Dryden wrote that, of all the poets, "he had the largest and most comprehensive soul". Thomas Carlyle asserted, "I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man." For Harold Bloom, "Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is. The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually."

-- Daniel Hannan at The Telegraph UK