According to the Learning Channel, “[t]he latest installment of the hit POLICE WOMEN franchise moves to Cincinnati, Ohio – The Queen City – to follow four highly respected female officers with the Cincinnati Police Department. These fearless women will encounter intense cop drama and action as they patrol some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America, all while balancing kids, significant others, and life at home.”
Police Women of Cincinnati is filmed right here in my neighborhood. Sweet!
In the 1950 novel Whisky Galore, author Sir Compton Mackenzie (photo left) tells the story of two tiny islands in the Scottish Hebrides during that latter days of World War II. The last few supply boats haven’t brought any whiskey to the islands, and for twelve days, the islanders have been completely without. Worse, their beer supply is getting low too.
At the local hotel, 90-year-old Captain McPhee goes to the bar to refill his glass and is told by the barkeep, “I’m sorry, Captain McPhee, but unless the peer [beer] comes by Monday’s poat [boat] the peer will be where the whisky is, and that’s nowhere at all. I’m telling you you’ve had two pints of peer already this evening, Captain MacPhee, and no man can have more.” To this “[t]he ancient mariner turned on his heels and walked out of the bar without another word.”
Nearly an hour later, Dr. MacLaren enters the bar and asks if the Captain had seemed all right when he left the bar. Those in the bar filled him in on how the Captain had been turned away without a third beer.
“Well, the shock has killed him,” the Doctor announced. “And I’m not surprised. For the last fifteen years to my knowledge he drank his three drams of whisky and three pints of beer every night of his life and on such a tonic he might have lived to a hundred. He’s had not a drop of whisky for twelve days, and before that only one dram a night for nearly a month. And now to-night he wasn’t able to get his third pint of beer. Well, it’s killed him.”
No wonder my horoscope never comes true. I’ve been reading Virgo, and all along I’m a Libra.
If the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again hoping for a different outcome, then tell me please-oh-please why did I pick up the latest Patricia Cornwell novel? Cornwell’s protagonist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, is a paranoid narcissist, and that’s just for starters. 100 pages into this 500-page monstrosity, I found myself yelling at the characters, “For God’s sake, would you all just sit down and have a conversation?!” Scarpetta’s belief that all her nearest and dearest are pawns in her high-tech, high-intelligence, high-energy (don’t these people ever sleep?) chess game with The Diabolical is stunningly boring – and worse, interrupts what could be an excellent story. I just hope Scarpetta doesn’t send nanobots to attack me for criticizing the book. Port Mortuary gets a Frantic, Desperate, and Self-Absorbed D+.
