I enjoyed Hawaii Five-O back in the sixties. I watched it on an unreliable black-and-white TV sprawled on the rump-sprung Salvation Army couch along with my husband, Robert, our cat, Little, our dog, Roonie, and disorderly bits of my master’s thesis liberally intermixed. It was a good bit of fun, with all these exotic people and sunny beaches. Nobody got seriously killed, and even the felons had a sort of wholesome beachboy aura. There were some car chases, of course, but they were mostly just a noisy rip around the block in a couple of convertibles with bad mufflers.
So imagine my pleasure when CBS announced its return. Then imagine my disappointment when I actually watched it. There may have been a plot, but mostly what I remember was a lot of explosions and people getting beaten bloody, and of course the obligatory 100-pound bimbo whose proficiency in the martial arts is unmatched on 3 continents, except maybe by the 100-pound bimbos on all the other cops or soldier shows that vie for our prime-time attention.
The original NCIS, for example, is amusing, largely because of the spiky-haired lab technician who can make a gas chromatograph sing and seldom leaves the building. The 100-pound bimbo on that one is a transplanted Mossad agent who learned all these tricks Over There whilst being trained, by her father who is the head of Mossad, to be a whiz-bang assassin. She is drop-dead gorgeous, speaks half the world’s languages flawlessly, can strip down and reassemble a nuclear warhead in 3 minutes flat, and has a huge crush on her handsome colleague who is a slobbering idiot. So you can see why I like the lab technician.
NCIS Revisited is in its second year and has a 100-pound bimbo trained by Navy Seals or somesuch – a home-grown whirlwind who is the equal of any six bouncers fully armed with flame throwers and grenades. This show also offers up another techie who shares the Most Appealing Character slot with the resident psychologist and has a thing going with the spiky haired siren from the other show. Are you following all this? There will be a quiz.
Then there is Flashpoint, a relative newcomer. There is a 100-pound bimbo in this one too, but it is sometimes hard to tell because you almost never get to see the protagonists out of their spooky black riot gear outfits, with full face-plates, massive body armor, 150 pockets in their vests and pants full of spare ammunition clips, several different kinds of grenades, a couple of knives, a spare pistol or two, spools of garrote wire, a selection of exotic poisons, 2 or 3 pounds of C-4 explosives with blasting caps, and of course a highly sophisticated communication center and visual aid complex in their helmets. I watched 10 minutes of one show during which something like 10 of them, including the bimbo, surrounded a building using mincing little quick steps so as not to trip over their shoelaces, not conspicuous at all in their black moon suits on a bright sunny afternoon, and then with much shouting and trumpeting they kicked in both the front and back doors and were all over the place. They got their guy, of course, trying to flee down the fire escape as who wouldn’t? A scrawny latino who had been seen jaywalking or something, and there he was face down on the sidewalk surrounded by gum wads, dog turds, and black-suited, heavily armed goons, all congratulating one another on a job well done, while the remaining tenants of the building are left to fix the hinges.
And now there is a new show whose main character is a 100-pound bimbo. She is apparently a bounty hunter of some sort with superhuman martial skills and the tenacity of a honey badger. In the few minutes I watched by accident, triggered by a terse phone call, she transformed herself from Susie Creamcheese taking simple pleasure from an innocent birthday party or wedding or something into a snarling Klingon, fondling her automatic pistol while squealing away from the curb toward some situation that will no doubt involve kicking down doors in some grubby neighborhood.
It is hardly surprising that the violent prime time dramas are becoming bloodier, the crimes more horrible, the disembowelments more graphic. After all we are a bloodthirsty nation. Our heroes are bulked up goons that “…don’t take no crap from nobody,” confusing courage with homicidal rage. However, I am mystified with this recent popularity of anorexic women with grenades.
For that matter I mourn the passing of the innocent dramas of times gone by in which all the hangings took place off screen and shootings did not produce a red mist. Where Marshall Dillon always got his man and we didn’t have to watch while he exchanged body fluids with Miss Kitty.
Where the lantern-jawed Steve McGarrett would stand on a dock overlooking the wide Pacific, that carefully coiffed curl lifting in the gentle onshore breeze, a noble determined expression on his handsome face, assuring us that yet another criminal had been dealt with and that we could all sleep safe in our beds for yet another week.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Pioneer living
Chapter 1:
Last Friday my idiot tenant took a quick dump and dashed out the door, in a big, important hurry. It was not until late that afternoon, after the soaking rain started, that I went to rinse out a milk bottle in the kitchen sink and nothing emerged from the tap but a mournful sigh.
I looked up at the ceiling light to confirm that there was electricity. There was.
I turned on the hot water tap to make sure that the problem was not a matter of mice getting into the cold water line and blocking it up, but this did not appear to be the case. I tried the upstairs tap just to leave no stone unturned and to postpone the moment when I would have to accept the reality that Something was Wrong at the Well.
Meanwhile the idiot tenant had returned home and was upset that the water was not flowing. Upon intense questioning, he claimed that his water usage was, if anything, less than normal, no hoses left on. No 2-hour showers. No laundries since Monday.
Had this been a bright dry afternoon, with cheerful birdsong and scent of newmown hay, I would have gone down the hill to the Other House, occupied by the idiot tenant and as close as possible to the well, thrashed my way through the bramble and goldenrod jungle, over the stumps and half-buried barbed wire, and so to the well house and looked in. Unhappily, it was not such a day. It was cold and miserable and had been raining for an hour with increasing intensity. Furthermore, Spafford & Sons had been here not 3 weeks previous to install a new pump, the old one having fried itself, so I opted to assume the Aggrieved Customer hat and phoned them, implying that the problem could only be their faulty pump.
So it was that John, the representative of Spafford & Sons who had drawn the short straw, swaddled in wet weather gear, arrived and slogged out to the Scene of the Disaster, and discovered that the pump was fine, but the well was empty. To ensure that this brand new pump did not follow the trend set by its predecessor, he turned off the power and went for a Meaningful Dialogue with the idiot tenant. It did not take long to discover that the idiot tenant, in his hasty dash for the door had left the toilet running resulting in the entire contents of the well being relocated into the septic tank serving the Other House.
What happens, among other things, when the pump stops working is that all the water in the 520’ pipe that connects my kitchen sink to that muddy hole in the ground starts heading back from whence it sprang, loosening, along the way, all the sediment, clay, humus, mouse hair, insect parts, that have achieved a stable foothold in the pipe, but only in a north-bound current. Thus when the pump is finally operational once again, what emerges from my taps is all the newly dislodged accumulation amounting to a thick, dark brown sludge looking a lot like the material that the honey dipper sucked out of my septic tank last year, mercifully without the aroma.
Chapter 2.
So it was, in the gathering dusk of that dreary Friday, that I scanned the kitchenscape with the unhappy realization that there would be nothing coming out of the taps that could be used for washing, much less ingestion, for 3 or 4 days.
Luckily my rain barrels were full so I got a couple of buckets out of the greenhouse and rinsed out the potting soil and dead wasps and filled them full of pretty clean water with only a few globs of algae and small sticks. While dragging these back up to the house I got a Little House on the Prairie feeling of gritty self-sufficiency in the face of the hostile elements.
Once back to the kitchen I rinsed the larger chunks of spaghetti sauce out of the dutch oven using the effluent that spluttered out of the tap and then filled it with the nice clean bucket water which I heated on the stove. The dishwashing process, once I had adjusted the water temperature down from Scald to Yikes with a few scoops out of the bucket, went surprisingly smoothly in spite of the almost insurmountable instinct to turn on the tap, but finally I had the several days worth of dishes cleared off all surfaces, and escaped spaghetti sauce scraped off the counter.
I really wanted a shower, but did not feel this would be a good idea, so instead spent the evening watching drivel on my single reliable TV channel, and so to bed after a very sketchy sponge bath in Perrier water, followed by a quick pee flushed away with dark chocolate water.
The Very Next Day I ran into Shaw’s and got a 2 ½ gallon jug of Poland Spring’s finest. I celebrated the presence of this much clean water in the place by having spaghetti for supper.
During the afternoon I could have sworn that I could see the bottom of the toilet when I flushed it. I tried it several times to convince myself. Maybe.
But now I really felt the need for a shower. I considered going to motel, or turning up at somebody’s door dressed in a towel and a desperate expression, but in the end I just went back to the rain barrel, visions of Laura Ingalls Wilder beating laundry on the rocks. The main disadvantage of bathing in the sink is that the only part of you that gets to be warm is the part that is actually in the sink. Everything else is a shivering wasteland of duck bumps, but it does most certainly feel good when it’s over.
By Sunday afternoon I could definitely see the bottom of the toilet, so I went downstairs and ran water into the washing machine, which has a white enamel tub. The holes nearly disappeared when the water was maybe 6” deep. After draining this out and refilling, the holes were definitely visible in 8” of water. On the third try the color changed from tea to urine. Not wishing to drain the well yet again, I suspended my experiments for the time being.
However by Sunday evening, after many flushes – I was beginning to understand that compulsive cat in the viral video – the water was very nearly water colored, and so it came to pass that on Monday morning I added a bunch of foul-smelling laundry to a tub whose color I would describe as “light urine” and washed it.
And that very evening inserted myself in a long overdue shower, and while hosing the shampoo out of my eyes, vaguely wondered at the state of mind of people willing to heave themselves into an ox-drawn wagon and head for Montana with not a single bottle of Perrier.
Last Friday my idiot tenant took a quick dump and dashed out the door, in a big, important hurry. It was not until late that afternoon, after the soaking rain started, that I went to rinse out a milk bottle in the kitchen sink and nothing emerged from the tap but a mournful sigh.
I looked up at the ceiling light to confirm that there was electricity. There was.
I turned on the hot water tap to make sure that the problem was not a matter of mice getting into the cold water line and blocking it up, but this did not appear to be the case. I tried the upstairs tap just to leave no stone unturned and to postpone the moment when I would have to accept the reality that Something was Wrong at the Well.
Meanwhile the idiot tenant had returned home and was upset that the water was not flowing. Upon intense questioning, he claimed that his water usage was, if anything, less than normal, no hoses left on. No 2-hour showers. No laundries since Monday.
Had this been a bright dry afternoon, with cheerful birdsong and scent of newmown hay, I would have gone down the hill to the Other House, occupied by the idiot tenant and as close as possible to the well, thrashed my way through the bramble and goldenrod jungle, over the stumps and half-buried barbed wire, and so to the well house and looked in. Unhappily, it was not such a day. It was cold and miserable and had been raining for an hour with increasing intensity. Furthermore, Spafford & Sons had been here not 3 weeks previous to install a new pump, the old one having fried itself, so I opted to assume the Aggrieved Customer hat and phoned them, implying that the problem could only be their faulty pump.
So it was that John, the representative of Spafford & Sons who had drawn the short straw, swaddled in wet weather gear, arrived and slogged out to the Scene of the Disaster, and discovered that the pump was fine, but the well was empty. To ensure that this brand new pump did not follow the trend set by its predecessor, he turned off the power and went for a Meaningful Dialogue with the idiot tenant. It did not take long to discover that the idiot tenant, in his hasty dash for the door had left the toilet running resulting in the entire contents of the well being relocated into the septic tank serving the Other House.
What happens, among other things, when the pump stops working is that all the water in the 520’ pipe that connects my kitchen sink to that muddy hole in the ground starts heading back from whence it sprang, loosening, along the way, all the sediment, clay, humus, mouse hair, insect parts, that have achieved a stable foothold in the pipe, but only in a north-bound current. Thus when the pump is finally operational once again, what emerges from my taps is all the newly dislodged accumulation amounting to a thick, dark brown sludge looking a lot like the material that the honey dipper sucked out of my septic tank last year, mercifully without the aroma.
Chapter 2.
So it was, in the gathering dusk of that dreary Friday, that I scanned the kitchenscape with the unhappy realization that there would be nothing coming out of the taps that could be used for washing, much less ingestion, for 3 or 4 days.
Luckily my rain barrels were full so I got a couple of buckets out of the greenhouse and rinsed out the potting soil and dead wasps and filled them full of pretty clean water with only a few globs of algae and small sticks. While dragging these back up to the house I got a Little House on the Prairie feeling of gritty self-sufficiency in the face of the hostile elements.
Once back to the kitchen I rinsed the larger chunks of spaghetti sauce out of the dutch oven using the effluent that spluttered out of the tap and then filled it with the nice clean bucket water which I heated on the stove. The dishwashing process, once I had adjusted the water temperature down from Scald to Yikes with a few scoops out of the bucket, went surprisingly smoothly in spite of the almost insurmountable instinct to turn on the tap, but finally I had the several days worth of dishes cleared off all surfaces, and escaped spaghetti sauce scraped off the counter.
I really wanted a shower, but did not feel this would be a good idea, so instead spent the evening watching drivel on my single reliable TV channel, and so to bed after a very sketchy sponge bath in Perrier water, followed by a quick pee flushed away with dark chocolate water.
The Very Next Day I ran into Shaw’s and got a 2 ½ gallon jug of Poland Spring’s finest. I celebrated the presence of this much clean water in the place by having spaghetti for supper.
During the afternoon I could have sworn that I could see the bottom of the toilet when I flushed it. I tried it several times to convince myself. Maybe.
But now I really felt the need for a shower. I considered going to motel, or turning up at somebody’s door dressed in a towel and a desperate expression, but in the end I just went back to the rain barrel, visions of Laura Ingalls Wilder beating laundry on the rocks. The main disadvantage of bathing in the sink is that the only part of you that gets to be warm is the part that is actually in the sink. Everything else is a shivering wasteland of duck bumps, but it does most certainly feel good when it’s over.
By Sunday afternoon I could definitely see the bottom of the toilet, so I went downstairs and ran water into the washing machine, which has a white enamel tub. The holes nearly disappeared when the water was maybe 6” deep. After draining this out and refilling, the holes were definitely visible in 8” of water. On the third try the color changed from tea to urine. Not wishing to drain the well yet again, I suspended my experiments for the time being.
However by Sunday evening, after many flushes – I was beginning to understand that compulsive cat in the viral video – the water was very nearly water colored, and so it came to pass that on Monday morning I added a bunch of foul-smelling laundry to a tub whose color I would describe as “light urine” and washed it.
And that very evening inserted myself in a long overdue shower, and while hosing the shampoo out of my eyes, vaguely wondered at the state of mind of people willing to heave themselves into an ox-drawn wagon and head for Montana with not a single bottle of Perrier.
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