Potpourri, &c., for July 9, 2023

If you live in north Georgia, you already know more rain is coming. If you don’t, then it doesn’t matter. More time to read while the grass slowly grows too tall for the riding mower to cut.

I’m enjoying Diana Gabaldon’s Go Tell the Bees That I am gone. It’s 888 pages long in trade paperback, not counting the endnotes. I’ve often wondered if Diana or her publisher have considered including a synopsis of the series at the beginning of each novel to orient people who haven’t read prior books. If you started reading Bees without any knowledge of all the earlier books, you’d be completely lost.I don’t know who or what ticked off a skunk late last night, but getting the smell out of the house took a lot of Febreze. I was hoping our indoor/outdoor cat hadn’t “done anything bad” to the skunk and left it on the front porch. The smell’s gone now, so with luck, the skunk is freshening up one of our neighbor’s yards. We have been watching the TV series “1883.” It’s well-written but a bit gritty. Here’s Wikipedia’s synopsis of the overall plot: “The story is chronologically the first of several prequels to Sheridan’s Yellowstone and details how the Duttons came to own the land that would become the Yellowstone Ranch. It is the second installment produced in the Yellowstone franchise. The series consists of ten episodes and concluded on February 27, 2022.” It’s something to watch until”The Crown” resumes later this month.How many of you have seen  “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”? The reviews have been lukewarm even though the trailer looks good. We’ll probably watch it out of nostalgia regardless of what the critics have to about it. As Wikipedia reports, “Owen Gleiberman of  Variety described the film as a ‘dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum minus the thrill… Though it has its quota of ‘relentless’ action, it rarely tries to match (let alone top) the ingeniously staged kinetic bravura of Raiders of the Lost Ark … time travel, in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is really an unconscious metaphor, since it’s the movie that wants to go back in time, completing our love affair with the defining action-movie-star role of Harrison Ford. In the abstract, at least, it accomplishes that, right down to the emotional diagram of a touching finale, but only by reminding you that even if you re-stage the action ethos of the past, recapturing the thrill is much harder.'”According to Variety, “‘Bones’ Creator on Potential Revival: ‘Every Once in a While, We Are All Nostalgic Enough to Think Maybe We Should Do It Again’” I hope this doesn’t happen because “they” may change some of the primary stars, and then the show just wouldn’t be the same. If it doesn’t get a reboot, I’m fine with that because the Kathy Reichs series is independent from the TV show.

—Malcolm