A seething mass of turgid drama.

As we close our our trial Apple TV membership, we're watching Bad Monkey - a crime/comedy series starring an actor who we generally do not like, Vince Vaughan. However, we're enjoying it. It reminds me of Elmore Leonard (which is a very good thing).

We watched the new Deadpool last night. It was... okay. I enjoyed the first two quite a bit, but this one felt like it went full Marvel/Disney. Well, as full Disney as it could and still keep the Deadpool character, and not have singing animated sidekicks. If you're a Marvel superhero fanboy, you'll get all the jokes, cameos, and storyline linked to the complete Marvel universe. If you're not... you kind of sit there.

We walked to a pasta shop beforehand and each had a plate of house-made pasta, which was okay and much better than getting a burger and fries during the movie. I knew the 7 PM showing meant a late night, and even with catching a passing cab right away we didn't get home until close to 10. I am feeling that lack of sleep today.

We watched a PBS show last night that had the amateur historian who co-discovered Richard III's grave. She's clearly a committed Ricardian, and this show was her showing primary source evidence to a lawyer for him to judge her belief that the revolts against Henry VII were in fact led by escaped Princes from the Tower, and not by frauds Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

(I lean somewhat Ricardian myself, if only out of contrariness against the dominant Tudor propaganda. But... it seems to me that the most likely scenario is that Richard had the princes killed - he had the most to benefit.)

The thing that annoyed me about the show was that the lawyer consulted experts to judge if the documents were plausibly real. He judged that they were. (And one was incredibly cool - a document in Dutch archives with an attached royal seal for Richard, the younger prince. Wow.) And thus the show determined that her story was plausibly true.

I would agree that the documents are plausibly not forgeries. But that doesn't mean that the young men in question were actually the princes; the show completely ignored any hint that people behind the rebellions had anything to gain if either had gained the English throne. Just because a document from the court of Maximilian shows that he gave money to "Richard IV" doesn't mean that the person was actually Richard! It means that Maximilian used that reason, and he clearly would have benefited with supporting an English king taking his throne.

Or the argument that Perkin Warbeck charged with treason means that he was truly Richard, because Warbeck was supposedly Dutch, and treason only applies to English subjects. That's cheap legalistic linguistics. He was charged with treason because he led a revolt against the Crown.

Then there's the line they used in the opening teaser: "This has the potential to change history." No it bloody does not. Time travel has the potential to change history. Her story has the potential to change our stories and interpretation, but history is going to stay unchanged, thank you very much.

Chalk this show down to propaganda. Agitprop bugs the hell out of me, even if I am sympathetic to its views.

We watched Weird, the Weird Al biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe. It was moderately funny, mostly because it made no pretense of being factual. (Weird Al gets tired of writing parodies and releases his own original songs... the hit being "Eat It" which then gets ripped off by Michael Jackson.) Also, Jack Black does a stellar Wolfman Jack.

I thought the cleverest bit was a downward-spiraling W.A. staggering onstage in Florida: shirtless, drunk, and in leather pants - mimicking the infamous Jim Morrison concert. When he threatens to "whip it out," as the cops rush onstage and arrest him for lewd behavior it's revealed that he brought out his accordion.

Worth watching once.

I have never had a great tolerance for stupidity. Watching Unstable I kept commenting about how Rob Lowe's character wasn't "quirky yet brilliant", he was an overly-entitled genius who needed a smackdown and a leash to reach his potential. Even moreso, Fred Armisen's needy and equally-entitled character made me want to punch him in the face repeatedly.

(Also, companies, and boards of directors, don't work the way that this show has them. Sudden Nobel Prize-worthy breakthroughs aren't required for a completely unsuitable CEO to keep his job. The CEO can't fire a board member. If he can, because he owns the company, then he's not at risk of losing his job because he owns the company. And that guy shouldn't be the CEO at all, he should be the Chief Scientist. Put someone competent in charge to run the firm - which they have, as one of the main characters who apparently has no significant duties given the script has her running after the CEO all the time - and let the science guy Do Science where he can actually accomplish things.)

I realized that I hate these kind of characters when I watched What About Bob? in college. My friends thought it was hilarious, but I sympathized with Richard Dreyfuss and equally wanted to kill Bill Murray's character.

We watched four episodes of Foundation and I am done. (Dun dun dun!) I don't care about gender/race swapping - I actually thought it worked better with Gaal Dornick to emphasize her naivety and not fitting in. But it's clear that this adaptation has some names in common with the books and nothing else.

The books were a product of their time, as well as the author's viewpoint, in their emphasizing rationality and science over faith and superstition. They also had very little action, usually two or three people talking about what happened. So sure, changes and updates needed. But instead the series deliberately subverts the original - the TV Salvador Hardin says "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" - a core tenet of the character in the books - is "an old man's philosophy." The series goes totally woo-woo with visions, mind-links to dead characters, and seems to have ripped off large parts of Dune. It turns the Foundation settlers into a religious cult. (I think the conceit of the book would have worked better: that the Foundation thinks it is there solely to safeguard learning by producing an Encyclopedia Galactica. Up until the first Seldon Crisis when he disabuses them of that notion and they have to flail upon losing their core purpose.)

Also, a robot kills people. Who invented the Three Laws of Robotics? Oh, right, Isaac Asimov.

I don't get it. If you dislike the original material so much that you want to discard and disavow all of it, why adapt it in the first place?

We tried watching Eugene Levy do the Bourdain thing, but it didn't hold our interest.

Ted Lasso picked up for the wife after the first episode, and we are now into S2 and still enjoying it. I'm trying to not pick up too many spoilers. The timing looks like it will work out to finish watching S3 before our free trial ends. Apple TV doesn't seem to have much content, so I will cancel with no regrets. I still think we'll end up with Acorn TV but that will be down the road, when we've exhausted Netflix again.

Yesterday during my physical therapy appointment, the guy was making small talk while stretching my shoulder. Upon learning that I work in finance, he asked me what advice I would give.

I was tempted to say "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but sensibly refrained and instead replied "Max out your 401(k)."

[Whiny Seinfeld voice] What is the point of light brown sugar? Either commit to the flavor of brown sugar, or just use white sugar. [/whiny]

(I actually loathed Seinfeld when it was on the air. I realize that makes me one of about 1000 people who were of TV-watching age in that era.)

We recently saw John Dies at the End. It was... odd. I guess it was a fairly popular book and the movie tried to keep what fans liked. The director made Bubba Ho-Tep, so he's no stranger to this sort of thing.

I can only describe it as a mash-up of Evil Dead and Naked Lunch, if the protagonists were two 20-something slackers.