I spent Saturday catching up – sending emails, confirming work, and catching up most of all with the magazine of which I am an editor and which had some lingering matters I’d been putting off in the general swirl of work. Otherwise, a fairly uninteresting day, with one great tragedy: my favourite cake shop no […]
TV time
The GF had a late call tonight, so I had the ipad and watched a bit of I will destroy you. I think I am unused to watching anything on television, as I found myself looking at it rather than sinking into it, though I did start enjoying it partway through the second. Yet remained […]
End of a ritual
We watched the penultimate episode of The Wire last night. Magnificent, despite the problems with the final season more generally, this is unambiguously one of the best episodes in the entire show. Marlo saying “My name is my name” – brilliant. Tonight, the end.
Still in seclusion
Another day in seclusion. This morning I had my Spanish class, which went quite well – a bit of reading (Primero estaba el mar by Tomás González), some conversation about dogs in prams. A brief chat with the GF last night which was pleasant, and the start of the third of The Wire which remains […]
Drowning
The Boddhisattva had been given two tickets to the new Paul Chiang exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. She did not intend to use them so we took them off her. Off we went down to Yuanshan where the museum is located (also the big farmer’s market in the expo centre), stopping first for […]
Saul returns
We watched the first episode of the new season of Better Call Saul last night. Very promising, particularly as I found the last season a bit flat. I was pleased in particular that I could follow much of the Spanish – I had thought I’d forgotten all of it. Otherwise it was a quiet sort […]
Tourism in the time of coronavirus
Yesterday we went to what is normally Taiwan’s busiest tourist site, the mountain village of Jiufen, formerly a declining gold mine site, which took off after a clever marketer realised that it is very similar to the setting of the Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away (or perhaps it did inspire the setting for the film, […]
Da’an town
Apologies for the tortured pun. As readers familiar with Taipei will gather, we (the Bodhisattva, Woodland Creature and I) went into town today, to one of the nice parts of the city. Started around Yongkang Street, which is a slightly touristy but nice street with plenty of tea shops and a startling number of umbrella […]
Televisual interlude
With the third season of the Good Place finished (the fourth is not on Netflix in Pakistan), and Watchmen pending the return of my hosts from their trip to Karachi, I watched an episode of Dracula. This was…. ok. Some quite funny bits, particularly around a nun (“trapped in a loveless marriage”). But as with […]
Two shows
In the past two days I have watched episodes from two different TV series and though the audience (I imagine) overlaps substantially, one was repellent to me and the other gripping. The first was something called Rick and Monty, one of the (relatively) new breed of animated television series for adults. It was basically the […]