A Royal Distraction for Your Weekend

Today's distraction comes just in time for the weekend.

I bequeath upon all of my loyal readers the gift of the resplendent new Netflix series The Crown.

A period drama about Queen Elizabeth II's ascension to the throne, The Crown has been advertised as the successor must-view period piece for all of us still mourning the loss of Downton Abbey from our appointment viewing schedule.

I'm here to tell you that it isn't that at all.

It's better. Far better.

Lavishly and lovingly created by Peter Morgan who has mined this material before in the film The Queen and stage play The Audience, both starring Dame Helen Mirren, The Crown takes historical liberties by peering into the private lives and conversations of Britain's royal family, and it attempts to show just how like the rest of us they truly are. They love, loathe, and lose as all people are apt to do but unfortunately, they must do it all under the microscope of public scrutiny. Claire Foy is a revelation as the young princess cruelly and unpreparedly thrown into the abyss of duty, and Dame Eileen Atkins will almost make you forget the Dowager Countess in her spot-on portrayal of the slightly bitter and very acerbic Queen Mary of Teck. And just for good measure, there is John Lithgow, one of my all-time favourite performers, doing a spot-on Winston Churchill. (Spot-on. Get me! Already speaking like a Brit.)

My only complaint as I watched the first three episodes this afternoon is that Matt Smith, who portrays the suddenly emasculated Prince Phillip, looks far too much like a Trump son for my liking. Maybe it's the pomaded hair or maybe it's just the vicious Aryan scowl, but he had me quite unnerved. Anyway, I find it very hard to believe that Prince Phillip was EVER the doting father that he is shown to be in these first installments.

So, if you are desperately searching for diverting entertainment this weekend, I cannot recommend The Crown highly enough. Binge watching has never been better.

You're Welcome.

Shabbat Shalom to all who observe.

The Best Distraction...Possibly EVER.

Last evening I retired to my couch, no snacks in hand due to the unfortunate timing of a medically induced fast, in order to watch Game Seven of the World Series. I did this primarily because I am a baseball fan. The Blue Jays are my lifelong love, but I am first and foremost a baseball fan. There are beauty and poetry on that field. Every pitch of every game is a separate contest within the main. It is the only team sport where the individual battles, those of pitcher versus hitter, have the potential of changing outcomes. It is a thinking person's game. The cerebral player can succeed right alongside the physically gifted. Head, heart, and muscle all combine in one perfect incarnation, the baseball player.

So, settling in to watch the seventh game of the World Series, even though my beloved Blue Birds had been eliminated by one of the final two, was a foregone conclusion. I expected to be swept up in excitement. I expected to be entertained. I expected to hear from friends from both Cleveland and Chicago during the game as to the range of emotions they were feeling. I fully expected a collective experience.

I didn't expect it to be a sui generis moment.

It was rare. A once in a lifetime viewing experience, made even more unique with the involvement of social media. For a split second, it felt as though most of North America was engaged in exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. The Husband was texting me what he was going through from a bar in D.C, as he viewed with election-weary Beltway denizens desperate for a distraction. My Facebook feed was clogged with friends from both sides of the diamond. My Twitter feed, which has been filled with ugliness, misogyny, antisemitism, and hate for weeks, suddenly became all about the beauty of baseball. Casual observers were suddenly transfixed. Rabid fans were hyperventilating. Both teams were equal in their excellence. There was a moment during the unbelievably and most certainly divinely inspired rain delay when I mused honestly about not wanting the game to end, even though it was way past my bedtime. I found myself kibbitzing online with friends, as we all recognized the communal joy. It was singular and beautiful and it can't ever possibly be repeated.

I am not a Cubs fan, but I felt their unmitigated joy. I am not a Cleveland fan, but I was absolutely crestfallen for them. For one night in November, baseball was pure again. The outside shit ceased to exist for just a nanosecond, as we all reveled in beauty together.

Wordless Wednesday...A Chance to Remember That There Is Still Beauty In The World

I promised positive images and stories until the conclusion of the American shitshow. I am finding suitable distractions more and more difficult to come by given how saturated the media coverage has been. Thank God for a seven game World Series. A friend remarked this morning that he wished it could be best of eleven so that it would get us through Tuesday.

In any case, this image comes from our recent trip to Alaska. The excitement I felt seeing these graceful creatures in their natural homes was immeasureable. We humans don't always do coexistence well. Alaskans are a gigantic leap ahead in that regard.

Note: I have decided to blog through November as the mood suits. There will be photos, recipes, and music just as in other years, but the stories will be organic and not pressured. I seem to work better that way. If I manage 30 in 30, great. If not, also great. I promise that there will be enough content for all. Thanks to all who support this space. I look forward to a month of interactions. 

November is the Cruelest Month or..How To Maintain Sanity In An Insane World

It's November and you know what that means, right?

Well, maybe not.

It is November the first and that means the commencement of National Blog Posting Month. Every November since 2011, I have taken on the challenge of thirty posts in thirty days. It is exhausting, emotionally draining, and frankly it plays havoc with my creativity gene. I have tried to maintain a standard of excellence throughout these exercises, but it is impossible to know if I have ever truly succeeded. As I recently looked back on some of those mid-month posts, I noticed quite a bit of cow dung mixed in with the jewels. The Husband is adamantly opposed to my signing up this year mostly out of his own self-preservation. He frustrates easily by my constant whining about source material and he certainy tires of showing up in these missives.

In addition, I promised my single digit of readers that I would put a more positive face on these blogs at least until after the S&M exhibition to the south has reached climax. This added task of NaBloPoMo just might make that more difficult, but I promise to try.

So what to do?

I'll leave it up to you the "not-so-faithful" readers to decide. If I get more than twenty likes or comments on Facebook or in the comment section on this space, I will endeavour to fill your blog-reading needs. If not, I have my answer and I will relax and watch November pass me by like a normal person. So, basically it all rests on your collective shoulders. I promise I won't take it personally should the groupspeak deem it a non-starter.

So, off you go. Yea or Nay? Blue or Red? Sedate or Crazy?

Voting responsibilty is difficulty, isn't it?

Today's relaxing news. I'll see your Basket of Deplorables and raise you a Basket of Gus! Admit it. It made you smile.

My Fortnight of Positivity: Dream or Reality? (Or...My Feeble Attempt to Reclaim My Social Media Feeds)

If you have somehow missed my last two posts, (I'm genuinely stunned into silence!) I am currently engaging in an exercise to bring civility back to our social media feeds by posting ANYTHING that isn't related to the shitstorm of ugliness we all are dealing with leading up to November 8th. Please join me in this exercise by refraining from posting ugly partisan memes, badly sourced pseudo-stories, and nastiness in general. We could all use a healthy dose of nice. Let's put the "social" back into social media.

As we sit and wallow in the eyes of our own personal hurricanes, it is so very easy to forget that there is much to be grateful for. Sometimes that joy can be blindsiding. Such is the case with my nephew's Bar Mitzvah which we will be celebrating this Shabbat.

As a parent of adult children, I've long since put the B'nai Mitzvah "circuit" in the rearview. I've grown complacent when it comes to celebrating these rites of passage of other people's kids and sometimes I have even bemoaned the need to attend and wrongly viewed it as a chore. But, this one feels different. This particular Bar Mitzvah is the second to last in our immediate family and I am experiencing a real sense of life's impermanence and fleeting nature. In the very near future, it is entirely possible that I will ascend the ladder of generations. No longer the parent or the aunt or the cousin, but instead one step removed. That idea has me a bit freaked. My dad used to say that he knew he had aged out when they started asking him to do the Motzi at simchas. That, he says, is the quintessential old man's job.

So this weekend I plan to revel in my family's joy and not take a single moment for granted. I will feel pride as I watch my youngest nephew take a giant leap forward. And...I will bake mounds of chocolate cookies for the occasion because that's what you're supposed to do when faced with good things.

Stop and smell the chocolate.

Shabbat Shalom to all who observe. 

This Cynic's Continued Attempt At Positivity (or..How to Keep Social Media Out of the Gutter Until After November 8th)

If you missed yesterday's post, I am currently engaging in an exercise to add niceness to our social media feeds by finding ANYTHING that isn't related to the crap we all are seeing leading up to November 8th. Please join me in this exercise by refraining from posting ugly partisan memes, badly sourced stories, and misery in general. We could all use a healthy dose of charm. Let's make social media social again.

Today's posting of good news comes from Sea World in Orlando.

I must admit that this is the last place whose virtues I thought I would be extolling, given their recent negative history with large marine mammals and my natural hostility towards keeping them in captivity. That said, sometimes...and I do stress sometimes...these places can do good work towards the care and protection of vulnerable creatures.

Such is the case of this female Adelie penguin who is suffering from feather loss, the penguin version of alopecia. Apparently, this sort of thing can occur from time to time, but it can be fatal as penguins require their feathers to swim and therefore eat. The good people at Sea World came up with a solution. They made this fine lady her very own, customized, penguin-sized wetsuit.

If you follow the link, there is a little video showing our girl joining in all the normal penguin games and doing all the everyday things that penguins do.

What a remarkable time in which we live whereby we can recognize that all life has merit and that we should attempt to find dignity for all creatures. Please don't kill my happy buzz with talk of how this penguin is taking precedence over more important things. Sometimes, we all need to find some measure of peace. Today, this little Adelie is mine.

A Cynic's Journey Towards Positivity. (Or...How to Get Through to November 8th Without Committing Mass Murder.)

I am blogging today because, in all honesty, I am finding my social media feeds and television to be downright depressing. If I see one more meme about ANYTHING I might just have to chop down the closest tree, whittle it thinly into toothpicks, and then very slowly insert each one most painfully into my eyeballs and ear canals thereby rendering me blind and deaf until after this shitstorm is over.

Please just make it stop already. All of us. STOP!

So, my pledge to whatever faithful readers I still have left is my unwavering commitment to post nothing but my version of positivity until after November 8th. If I should falter, you all have my permission to inundate me, until the end of my days, with a continuing loop of the most heinous disco music ever recorded. I plan on posting quite a few in this sanguine series, so I apologize in advance for making myself a nuisance. Call it my coping mechanism.

Today's entry into this confirmed cynic's view of "What Makes My World Great" is a brief moment of my day.

You know that feeling you get when a stellar song from a favourite Broadway musical enters into your playlist, and it makes you smile, and you realize that the real reason you're smiling is because you actually saw this person perform said number live, and you recall greatness?

Yah. That.

Today I had that moment while on the treadmill with Andrea Martin singing "Just No Time at All" from Pippin. By the way when we saw it? She flat out stopped the show. A five-minute standing ovation. This is so worth the 8 1/2 minutes you will spend watching it. Trust me. It's Bigly.