My latest random connection is wacky, but it appears from a viral test currently making the rounds of Facebook that I’m almost entirely right-brained. I’m now allowed to be random and wacky with impunity. According to Sommer-Sommer.com I am congenitally creative, chaotic, intuitive, imaginative, curious, and fantastical. I would add tangential to that list of adjectives.
Where was I? Oh, right…
I’m going to begin this completely off headline and mention the Weeds finale on Sunday night, which was nothing like what I was expecting. And that’s about the only half-assed, backhanded compliment I can give it.
I did a little snooping around the TV fan forums a week or so ago to see what people thought of the last season, which doesn’t appear to be much. It seems I was one of the few who thought it was an improvement over seasons five and six; everyone else thought it was slow, unworthy of the show, which must mean it was leading up to something big. While reading posts and threads, I stumbled on one by a guy, presumably a Ghey, who postulated that this entire season was a dream Nancy was having while in a coma after being shot in the head. Everything was being reconciled in her subconscious: she was moving towards being legit, finally a good mother to her youngest child, and had come complete circle to live once again in the idyllic but more upscale ‘burbs that are Old Sandwich, CT (a play on Old Greenwich). In the last episode, wrote the poster, the story would come back to the hospital where Nancy was really brain dead, and the gang would pull the plug, Nancy’s body would die, everyone would sob. End of series.
No such luck. Instead we were treated to a flash forward nine years or so from the penultimate episode to her youngest son’s bar mitzvah, which brings everyone together for lots of hand wringing and reconciling and moments of not-very-lucid insight into themselves, and then this lame ending with everyone passing around a legal joint, and even Nancy—who has hitherto been limited to sucking on iced lattes through a straw—takes a toke.
The interminable final shot in Weeds delivers zero emotion.
However, as lame as I found it, an online friend loved it, and was howling last night about how an era was over. Then again, he’s Canadian—pot is a birthright for them, and an emotional issue with their hated, hateful cousins south of the border.
So, no more Ma Botwin and her man children. Onward.
Much as we love Elizabeth McGovern and have always been puzzled as to why her career in Hollywood stagnated to the point she had to move to England—which is akin to heading up the 101 freeway in reverse,
BAKER STREET
Since the posting of last week’s Baker Street column, in which I pointed out that the English are the worst bunch of people on the planet and that William Shakespeare wore clown shoes, I have been inundated with hate mail and threats from across the Atlantic. While it’s true I said England has contributed nothing of value to humankind other than some good pop music, can’t the English be happy that I said they have some good pop music?
I’ve been called a git, a wanker, a prat, a nancy, a wally, a tosser, a twat, and a knob by my parents since I was born, which has made me overly sensitive to criticism. Fortunately, the English are noted for being polite, so their hate mail usually starts with a compliment like, “I say, chap, bloody good show giving us what-for last week,” before moving on to point out the inadequacies in my story.
For example, I apparently neglected to give credit to England for producing some noteworthy film actors over the years. Sir Laurence Olivier was mentioned, as was Sir Ralph Richardson. Dame Judi Dench. Sir Mick Jagger, for his role in Freejack (1992). Dame Kate Beckinsale, whom I just knighted myself so we can pretty up the images around here.
It's not too late to stop Prince William from marrying the wrong Kate, or at the very least knocking the other one out in the vestibule at Westiminster Abbey, slipping Beckinsdale into her dress, hiding her under a veil until it's too late ...
Speaking of girls from England called Kate, Ms. Middleton seems to have won approval from my female friends (which are legion, as you suspected).