Pi Day Friday

Happy Pi Day! Also, happy 146th birthday to Albert Einstein. (I love that his birthday is Pi Day. Seems appropriate and makes it so easy to remember.) Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit here about the weirdly omnipresent transcendental number we call pi (p) — 3.14159 (roughly speaking).

As such, I won’t go into it again here today. (Though I do plan something for my Substack blog — where there is a fresh audience for old posts.)

This is actually a Friday Notes post, although — change for the new year— I’m dropping the standardized title format I’d started using for day-based category posts.

So, no more post titles such as Mystery Monday 5/15/23 or TV Tuesday 3/12/24 (or Friday Notes (Dec 20, 2024) — the longer date format there grew particularly bothersome to me). I was getting too lazy about naming posts, but I’d gotten weary of the time and effort required to find short snappy titles (hopefully with a pun or oblique reference).

[Y’all have no idea how much brow sweat goes into my post titles or the three-paragraph punchline-based lede. That effort was why I started using date-based titles in the first place. But they began to bother me almost immediately. For one, they provide no information whatsoever about the post’s content. I think that’s okay for Friday Notes, so we’ll see about those.]

In any event, as it stands now, it seems I’ll publish most of my posts on Substack (though it remains to be seen how active I’ll be there — I’ve grown to have mixed feelings). My thinking is to post something at least once a month here. Maybe it’ll just be a monthly Friday Notes. Maybe more. Maybe not even that.

The problem, simply put, is that it’s hard to give a shit (about anything) anymore.

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We’re confronted with the world I feared starting back in the 1970s. (I called it “The Death of a Liberal Arts Education”.) After the narcissistic 1980s, my fears grew in the 1990s with the interweb and even more intensely with the new millennium. The current situation is the result of decades of unbridled American foolishness (a kinder term I’m trying to believe in as opposed to my gut feeling of abject stupidity and incompetence).

I don’t know whether to laugh derisively, weep unconsolably, or drive off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. (Who wants to ride shotgun?) It’s a slow-motion trainwreck I’ve been watching for fifty years. The current situation is actually the logical outcome of what’s been going on all that time.

I wrote last year (before the election) about Social Entropy. Since the election, the miasma of angst has become palpable. For me — and perhaps this is shared — it’s the severe cognitive dissonance of what amounts to the entire cultural history of humanity and its time-tested statements about what is right compared to the enshitification of just about everything now. But especially our social and political interaction.

Now each half (roughly) of the country sees the other half (roughly) as an implacable enemy for whom there can be no quarter. Politics is no longer about getting anything done, it’s about your team winning.

I suspect it’s the sense of “there’s no coming back from this” that weighs on us. The way this seems “the new deal” — permanent somehow. The world most (many? at least some?) of us considered reasonable seems to have fled from the onslaught of callus boorishness and hair-trigger take-no-prisoners attack tactics. And the ongoing lack of any accountability from supposed safe-guard institutions is heartbreaking.

Simply put, in an America stupid enough to elect our own President Camacho — or stupid enough to not vote because of an astonishing inability to compare two things that are not even close to the same — what’s the point of anything anymore?

I think a lot of people are having a hard time maintaining while living in Hell.

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Speaking of maintaining, I came to a recent realization regarding my values.

I’ve been taking refuge lately in old TV shows, stuff from the 1960s and 1970s. Ironside (1967-1975), The Saint (1961-1969), The Avengers (1961-1969), and Danger Man (1960-1968). All are currently available on Amazon Prime. For a little contrast, also Spenser: For Hire (1985-1988) and JAG (1995-2005), which spun off NCIS, one of my favorite shows for many years — see all these posts).

Watching Ironside reminded me of the mild crush I had on the character Eve Whitfield (Barbara Anderson). And I hadn’t connected the dots of that early crush and someone with the same name I got serious enough about to consider marrying in the 1980s. I suspect I never connected those dots because it was the character Eve I focused on, not the actor playing the role. (And I generally don’t conflate those.)

More to the point, it got me thinking about old childhood media character crushes and why I was so attracted to those women. In a word: competence. I’ve long said I’d rather work with a competent asshat than a really nice but incompetent person.

Intelligence and education are certainly part of competence, but one can be highly competent without them — many are skilled and talented in various ways. So, while I place a very high value on intelligence and education, I don’t see them as required to be highly competent at something.

I may have been only 11, but I was head over heels!

One of my biggest crushes was on Samantha Stevens (Elizabeth Montgomery) on Bewitched (1964-1972). Her competence was her magic and that she was the show’s sensible center. It was her values and intelligence that drove the show. (By all accounts, Elisabeth Montgomery was apparently an amazing human being one would be lucky to know. Worth every bit of crush I had on her.)

Some of the others: Judy Robinson (space explorer), Supergirl (the “girl” of steel), April Dancer (top spy), Emma Peel (another top spy), the list goes on [see Strong Female Characters]. I’ve never been one much drawn glamour or empty beauty. I lived in Los Angeles for almost twenty years; empty beauty is common coin there. Even as a child, for me, it has always been about substance.

These thoughts all led me to the realization about maintaining. I’m a product of the drug-fueled 1960s and 1970s where a key value was the ability to maintain while under the influence (of whatever). So, I’ve never been down with the modern tendency to live life online and to visibly wear all your anxiety and fears. I understand the “group therapy” and sharing aspects. Perhaps some really do benefit, but I’ve never looked to the interweb for solace, and I’m not sure it’s wise to do so. “Mental Health” apps and webpages make me especially wary.

Bottom line, my thinking (for good or ill) is hugely based on ability. I don’t say “merit” because merit can be assigned arbitrarily from birth or wealth. No, I mean ability. Competence. Usefulness.

If you want nice, get a dog. I want people who can get shit done.

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For instance, the guys at the auto shop who installed my new tires yesterday.

I’ve been driving around on 2008 tires (original equipment on the 2010 car I own). The car only has 35,000 miles on it, so the tires are not worn, but the last service I had, they pointed out tires decay over time, and I should replace them ASAP.

Took me nine months to get around to it, but as of yesterday my car has new Bridgestones on it (and I’m $1600 poorer). It might be my imagination, but I think I can feel a difference in how it drives. More stable somehow.

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Speaking of strong female characters, I finished watching all four seasons of Nikita (2010-2013). Three-and-a-bit-more, really; the last season only has six episodes compared to the 22 episodes in the first three. The CW gave the series a chance to wrap things up (which was nice of them — many shows have ended abruptly).

I liked it enough to watch to the end, but by that end I wasn’t as up on the show as I was at the beginning. The CW has a reputation for good-looking actors on its shows, and that was on full display in Nikita. The very attractive Maggie Q (Q for Quigley) — who got her start in Hong Kong modeling and acting in action movies — stars as Nikita Mears.

The show is based on a previous show, La Femme Nikita (1997), which itself is based on the 1990 Luc Besson film, La Femme Nikita. Which is a nice companion film to Besson’s 1994 assassin movie, Leon: The Professional (starring a young Natalie Portman and also Gary Oldman).

The plot involves a high-level very secret government organization, “Division”, that uses assassination to control world affairs (making it essentially like CURE in the Remo Williams Destroyer books). They abduct promising candidates no one will miss and train them to be expert assassins. Over time, the leader of the organization has become corrupt and is using the power of Division for his own ends.

Nikita was on death row for killing a cop, but her death is faked (exactly what was done to Remo Williams), and she is trained and inducted (unwillingly) into the rolls of Division assassins. She ends up becoming their top agent, and — for a time — believes in the legitimacy of Division. But she sees too many Bad Things happening and rebels. Ultimately, she escapes and determines to single-handedly bring down Division. That’s the backstory; the series begins with her on the outside nibbling away at Division.

I’ll say the show features some very interesting characters and (as always, if you like that sort of thing) is worth watching just for that. I don’t rank it up there among my favorites, but I don’t regret watching it. At times I almost bailed, but it remained just interesting enough to keep me watching. Overall, I’ll give it a meaty Eh! rating.

As usual, I took notes:

• Why doesn’t Division monitor all data that goes in and out? And why don’t they monitor (or even block) all cell phone traffic? Super-secret organization, but Nikita’s double agents are able to communicate with her from inside Division using both their secret chat and ordinary cell phones. Granted, without that the show’s plot has major problems, but Division was unpardonably stupid in this regard.

• Good heavens why did the highly paranoid and extra-careful Nikita so quickly and thoroughly trust her “dad” (who was, of course, a Division plant). If you guessed plot convenience, award ten points.

• Why didn’t the highly paranoid and extra-careful Alex check the watch for a bug or transmitter? It was given to her by Sean. And Seymour has a device that can check for transmitters. Another ten points for plot enabling.

• Why doesn’t Seymour have better parameter security? His “secret” locations get snuck up on several times. Yet more plot convenience.

• The show has a lot of obvious talk — unnecessary explanations of things. I assume for those with poor viewing comprehension. One example: when Cassandra tells Nikita when Max was born, it’s immediately obvious Max is Michael’s son. But the show has Nikita blurt it out. This goes on all the time, spelling out the obvious.

• There is a video game feel to the action scenes the way enemies get knocked down with a well-placed hit or bullet. The show often has the “good guys” reluctant, or refusing, to kill, yet they do quite a lot of it anyway. Apparently, many of those they shoot, aren’t wounded fatally, but just lie down and, I guess, wait for a medic. Pretty lame-ass behavior for supposed trained warriors.

• All the bad guys, and many of the good guys, were trained at the Stormtrooper school of shooting. Lots of rounds, very few hits. Reminded me of The Blacklist (2013-2023), which commonly featured gun play as a way of saying, “Hey, don’t run away. We just want to talk!”

[It’s a bit of long-time a stick in my craw, the overly casual depiction of guns and shooting at people. Any child raised on television since the 1970s or so has seen an astonishing amount of nightly gun use and death. Whadda world.]

• On the topic of gunplay, there sure were a lot of public gun battles. With no major consequences. All in good fun, I guess.

• Nikita is wonder woman. She doesn’t suffer from the “awesome out of the box” perfection of too many modern female action leads. Nikita earned her place as a top assassin, but she’s almost a little too good. She’s almost never wrong, and at times she survives against some overwhelming odds. Which can make great drama, but I feel they sometimes went overboard.

• Many of the characters, good and bad, make stunning leaps of intuition in guessing what the other side is up to. Percey (Xander Berkeley) especially, is one of those (evil) planners who seems to anticipate every move. Wheels within wheels within wheels.

• Lastly, I was struck by how fast the characters got around — something that also stood out in Person of Interest (2011-2016). It’s as if the characters have access to a transporter. In Nikita, characters often arrived at distant scenes in a matter of minutes. Locations around the world? A matter of hours. It’s common to edit out travel time, but on these two shows it seemed a bit magical.

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I’ve hit my word count ceiling, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Stay well tired, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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