The cast of Blacklist was amazing. The writers, less so. They spent so much time telling us how brilliant Elizabeth was, but barely ever showed us. What they showed us most often is that the only way they knew to create conflict was to have her do the absolute stupidist thing possible in nearly every situation.

“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”

Quinn’s Book by William Kennedy

When my previous independent pharmacist went out of business, they transfered all of my prescriptions to the nearest Walgreens. I switched to another “independent” that was part of Rite-aid’s network. The staff were poorly trained in customer service communications, passive aggressively taking control of every conversation and then not listening. I had multiple instances of prescriptions being lost or delayed, in one case for weeks. The owners didn’t care why I as a customer found these experiences frustrating and eventually told me I should just go to Walgreen’s. I did and the customer service has been so much better. Independent isn’t always better.

There is a Batman villain or tragic anti-hero named “Manbat” whose real name is Kirk Langstrom. Perhaps Wayne Bruce was confused by being called by the name Langstrom’s alter ego.

You can also get extended service updates from Microsoft for at least a year. $30 for up to 15 computers, although there are also a couple of ways to get then free. 1000 bing rewards points, or enabling Backup to sync your settings to OneDrive are supposed to both means to get them that will become available soon.

Eh, it’s no more problematic than the many canon retcons we’ve gotten. It may be there was an element on both earth and the Lanthanite homeworld that maintains Lanthanite immortality, but that element was lacking on Flint’s planet.

It’s an appealing theory, but how would you square it with the end episode reveal that Flint was no longer immortal since having left earth? Was McCoy just wrong when he reported that readings from the earlier tricorder scan show that Flint has been aging normally since he left Earth’s environment, and will soon die? We know little enough about Lanthanites in general, and Pelia in particular but it is implied that they are an alien race, so their long lifespan isn’t likely to be linked to remaining on earth, unlike Flint’s. Perhaps it wasn’t leaving earth that cancelled Flint’s immortality, but some element on Holberg 917-G?

Sadly, Earl Boen died of lung cancer in 2022.

Regarding The example given in the article, lying to get out of a social obligation , memorize this phrase: “I have a prior commitment.” People seldom challenge it or ask for details. It isn’t a lie, it is merely non-specific. That prior commitment could be as simple as “I made a commitment to myself to not do things I don’t feel like doing” or “I need to walk the dog” , descale the tea kettle or keep an appointment.

It’s nobody’s business but yours or perhaps your spouse’s which applies.

That sort of misidentification is another reason that dog bite statistics are unreliable; they depend not on rigorous breed identification but on amateurs’ identification based on physical traits shared by bull dogs, mastiffs and terriers. Artificially group dog bite reports involving a dozen unrelated breeds or mixes together under the misidentification “pit bull” and yeah, you make pit bulls sound scary.

Even when properly applied to pit bull type dogs, the term “pit bull” is imprecise because as wikiipedia states “pit bull is an umbrella term for several types of dog believed to have descended from bull and terriers. In the United States, the term is usually considered to include the American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, American Bully, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and sometimes the American Bulldog, along with any crossbred dog that shares certain physical characteristics with these.”

Anyone who argues that breed is a reliable indicator of violent behavior and refuses to acknowledging the lack of reliability of eye witness breed identification on the basis of appearance is arguing in bad faith.

That’s not a pitbull, it’s a Cane corso or another type of mastiff. That people so frequently misidentify various breeds as “pit bulls” is one of the factors that makes the statistics you cite unreliable. Even “pit bull” isn’t a specific breed designation. Any breed or mix with a boxy head and deep chest is likely to be mistaken for a pit bull.

Eddington was Valjean to Sisko’s Javier, not Javier himself.

“I was convinced up until the reveal that the “alien” was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire.”

I suspected the Pakled myself. That would have been an even bigger tonal mismatch, so I was glad to find that I was wrong.

You might be confusing Cthulhu with Crowley. Cthulu would be indifferent to most human activities other than boating.

Totally agree about Mitchell. Rong Fu is really good in the role and deserves some love from the writers. Mitchell is a recurring character rather than a regular, so it may not be an apples to apples comparison but still, she’s been there from the begining.

Bring Detmer in and give her some years overdue character development.

Trump reminds me of Baron Danglars from The Count of Monte Cristo. Both are tasteless nouveau riche bankrupts with repellent physiognomy.

It’s not what I read for primarily, nor did I say so. Your supposition is something of a strawman argument. There’s no need to be defensive on McCarthy’s behalf. Any writer receives much worse criticism than that no matter how good they are, often from themselves. We tend to be our own worst critics.

That said, poor grammar pulls me out of a story and that’s a common reaction.

A good writer might use such run on sentences sparingly as a matter of style, to good effect. William Kennedy’s opening paragraph in Quinn’s book is a good example. The quoted passage from Blood Meridian may be another such. As I said, I haven’t read McCarthy and don’t know if such run-on sentences are typical of his writing, so I asked.

Yeah, my stupid tablet somehow completed my comment submission before I finished typing it. I finished in an edit.

Jesus, those are some egregious run on sentences. I’ve never read McCarthy, now I’m not sure I should. Is this typical of his writing?