Acorn TV

"Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it"--Travels With Charley

We've started subscribing to Acorn TV, which has lots of interesting British shows.  Unfortunately we don't seem able to get it on our widescreeen TV, but we can still watch it on our computers.  Last night we saw the first of three episodes of a Waldemar Januszak documentary about Baroque art, which anticipated cinema in some ways.  But I couldn't get in into fullscreen on the downstairs computer, so we ended up watching it in my room. (I later figured out that my mistake downstairs was using the Safari browser instead of Foxfire.  B for Brains...)

Acorn TV also has some classic series like Upstairs, Downstairs.  It's one of my all-time favorite shows despite the occasional cliche.  I've started watching the third season, which is when it really hit its stride. (The first two are somewhat uneven.)  It begins with mother Lady Marjorie going down with the Titanic--most upper-class women actually survived!--and Captain James the jerky son taking an interest in father Richard's mousy secretary Hazel.  I fell in love with Hazel--why do I like mousy women so much?  Hazel soon married James, which was a mistake:  she should have married Richard despite his age!

My favorite character was Hudson the Scottish butler:  watch the ongoing contrast between his strictness toward the other servants and his deference toward the masters!  Anglicized Scots sometimes have a way of seeming more English than the regular English:  witness the Queen Mother and Colin Firth.

I still can't leave off the subject of Hillary vs. Bernie!  One Clintonite line is that Sanders wanted to get the Democratic nomination without doing the "work" that Clinton had done to earn the nomination over the past thirty years.  Yet, it seems to me, Hillary spent thirty years schmoozing and making connections and advancing within the party organization, while Bernie spent the same time actually promoting the policies that most Democrats care about, at a time when they've been in desperate need of that.  Which work is more important to the party?  The Clintonites who are still repeating "Sanders was not a Democrat" create an impression of the Democratic Party not as the famed "big tent" but as a high-class club that doesn't admit riffraff like Bernie!