"Ooo-ooo-ooo! I wanna be Just Like You!"

Trapped at the register from 8:00 to 2:00, most of that time alone, without a break of any kind; and just as I was about to take my first bite of lunch they called me back. When I finally returned to my own desk and started going through the book catalogs, I literally could not keep awake.

To be fair, the cause of this sleepishness was as much about boredom at what Macmillan and its various imprints were offering me as it was about my tiredness. Really, across the board, the Winter frontlists have been unexciting at best. Even Penguin, which usually has some interesting titles, had a dreary array of "sleepers" -- I mean that in the literal sense -- on offer.

Nothing succeeds like excess, so when one publisher tries something new and has a hit out of it, all of the other publishers (and even the original publisher) fall all over each other getting things onto the market that look, sound and read just like the thing that was the original big hit. J.K. Rowling has a lot to answer for, in one sense, for the outpouring of young sorcerers that gushed onto the marketplace in the wake of Harry Potter. There's even a professor employed at my college, a well-known figure who has appeared on Oprah, who hopped on the bandwagon last year with a very Harry Potterish series of her own. The college being what it is, we're all logrolling like crazy, me included . . . but you'd have to hold a loaded gun to my head to get me to read the thing, and depending on my mood at the time I might just tell you to pull the damn trigger.

The same thing happened with The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Jay Kinney sells a bazillion copies of his first two books, and now suddenly the Middle Reader catalogs are overflowing with knock-offs: The Dork Diaries and Ellie McDoodle to name just two. Alums of this institution are not slouching in this department, either. the author of the Big Nate series matriculated here.

It's no different in adult publishing. Roughly ninety percent of the sales pitches I read and listen to either begin or end with the stock phrase: "It's [Insert Bestselling Book Title Here] meets [Insert Bestselling Book Title Here]!!!"

"The Help meets Salem's Lot in a genre-bending bid to cash in on two completely different markets!"

Sometimes they don't bother with individual books, but just use author names instead.

"Fannie Flagg meets Stieg Larsson!"

"V.C. Andrews meets Jan Karon!"

"Patricia Cornwell meets Margaret Wise Brown!" (That's a Double Header joke. Can you guess why?)

A different way of marketing "same as" material is to say, "Fans of [insert Author or Book Title Here] will LOVE this complete rip-off!"

The one I'm looking at right now in the Macmillan catalogue is, "For fans of How to Train Your Dragon comes a fantastic new series about a boy and his dragon."

First: Are there any fans of How to Train Your Dragon? Second, this idea is so old that it pre-dates How to Drain, ehm, I mean Train, by about a hundred years. When it comes to dragons, I get off the train at My Father's Dragon and its two sequels by Ruth Stiles Gannett.

Meanwhile, I have to note that no one is pitching books as being "for fans of William Faulkner" -- or Margaret Atwood or Kurt Vonnegut for that matter. Honestly, I'm not sure that Faulkner would be able to get his books into print if he was starting out today. He's not "just like" anything else.

Here are some Hot Book Trends that I'm sick to death of.

1) Zombies. "Take my zombie -- PLEASE!" It's a vile movie genre that's been way overdone, and it's rapidly becoming a vile book genre that's been way overdone.

2) Metrosexual, kissable vampires. Somebody please explain to the breathless, heart-pounding Romantic Dolts that a Vampire is a CORPSE. I don't know about you, but I ain't kissing any corpses! In a related area -- female Vampire Hunters, Laurel Hamilton et al. I literally can't GIVE AWAY books by Hamilton and Charlene Harris. Everyone is sick of this shit. Why don't the publishers stop it?

3) Anything with Nicholas Sparks's name on it. The man should have his typing fingers amputated.

4) Anything that's "for readers of Nicholas Sparks."

5) Anything written for an adult audience that's narrated by a dog or "co-authored" by a cat. The Art of Racing in the Rain? Get behind me, Satan!

6) Anything by egomaniacal "comedians" like Chelsea Handler or Sarah Silverman or Tina Fey. Y'know what, guys? Dorothy Parker created the genre decades and decades ago, Fran Lebowitz refined it, and Parker and Lebowitz have the additional virtue of actually being funny. Handler is just a Dick, Silverman is just Wet, and Fey -- isn't much more than a face, really.

7) Anything with the title: "The [Insert Perceived Romantic Occupation Here]'s Wife." Or Daughter.

I could go on at length, but I'll end with this pet peeve: James Patterson has about two hundred and thirty seven books published every month under his name. He hasn't written ANY of them in years. I have to stock the bloody godawful things because every single one of them goes on the bestseller list for about five minutes. Then it's gone, and I'm stuck with literally a shelf full of ghost-written garbage with this clown's name on it.

No more. I'm going on strike. James Patterson, Clive Cussler, Jane Greene and several other popular no-talents are hereby banned from my store.

'Course, Garrison Keillor, Robertson Davies, Tom Sharpe and Alasdair Gray don't sell either, but I like them. We can but put the good stuff in front of the zombies and hope that they will take notice.

-- Freder.

Funky Flashman

I've been curious about George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels for some time. For one thing, my friend J___ is a big fan, and she has wonderful taste in books.  But I always end up thinking, "Do I really want to spend so much time in the company of such an insufferable cad?" and I end up passing.

That curiosity has also extended to the movie version of Fraser's second Flashman novel, Royal Flash, which is where I learned about the character in the first place. I'm a fan of 'seventies cinema -- that was My Time --  and to a lesser extent of Richard Lester, so this week I decided to take a flyer. This would be my tentative sticking of a toe into Fraser's waters.

With a script by Fraser himself I figured it would be faithful, and with Lester at the helm I figured it would be fun. I was largely right on both counts; but even if Fraser wasn't there in the extra features admitting that he softened old Flashy up a bit for the screen, I would have guessed as much. The Harry Flashman in this movie has a lot of bad qualities, but he's more put-upon here than putting upon. And it seems to me that something else is missing as well: the sense of real, not imagined, history. On paper, Fraser is able to place real historical events alongside the fiction. In this movie, there's nothing to indicate, if you didn't already know it, that several of the characters are Real Historical Figures.

I confess that I didn't know it about Lola Montez, and was tickled to learn after the show that her basic story depicted here is a true one, although much and cleverly augmented.

The movie has a terrific cast including Malcolm McDowell as Flashman, Oliver Reed (a personal favorite of mine, although don't ask me ever to watch him in Ken Russell's The Devils -- I won't do it!) as Bismark, Alan Bates and a parade of the cream of British Character Acting Aristocracy, including Hugh Griffith, Alistair Sim (the best screen Scrooge ever), Lionel Jeffries, Michael Holdern and even Arthur Brough -- Mister Grainger from Are You Being Served? -- who has one really memorable line as King Leopold.

So, you know it's well-acted. The other big, big thing Royal Flash has going for it is Great Scenery: the locations are absolutely stunning, and shot beautifully by Geoffrey Unsworth.

As directed by Lester, the picture is. . . vigorous. There's a lot of womanizing and a lot of comedic swordplay (watch Bates make a sandwich during one smashing bout) and a lot of double and triple dealing. The design is delightful and effective.

Royal Flash is good fun, but not a classic. I can't help but feel that it might have been better with just a bit of a sharper edge. The very good early scene with McDowell goading Reed into a losing boxing match is what I wish the rest of the picture was like. Still, it's good to see Lester at the top of his game, before he got sucked into the Superman franchise and gave us the largely dreadful number three.

I don't normally do commentaries, but for McDowell I made a partial exception. It brought a grin to my face to learn that Oliver Reed was every bit as much of a loose cannon as the rumors suggest. That grin was wiped away when McDowell, asked by the interviewer if he and Reed became friends during the filming, replies bluntly: "Oh, no, I didn't want to spend any time with him at all. He was such a drinker."

Did this sell me on trying the Flashman books? Well. . . sort of. I ordered a couple of them for the store and will take a closer look when they arrive.

-- Freder.

The Goodbye Look: Words of Wisdom from a Hardboiled Writer

Raymond Chandler is still my favorite of the hardboiled writers, and Hammett, of course, practically invented the genre, but for my money the most thoughtful and considered practitioner of the genre is Kenneth Millar, who wrote under the name Ross MacDonald. He's also the most autobiographical hardboiled novelist ever, turning deep swaths of his own experience into conflict for his characters.

I've been working my way through his volume of casual memoirs, but it's slow going -- not because it's dull, but because every few pages I come across something that hits home for me, and my mind wanders off down that half-guided tangent. Today I came across a passage that struck me as so correct and universal in its application that I have to share it here.

In a piece called "In the First Person," he writes:

A novelist has the ability to go back, clear to the very beginnings of his life, his troubles, his sorrows and convert them into something that will be pleasing and satisfying to him, and meaningful to other people. I can take a three-year-old's loss of his father, which was nothing but an undiluted sorrow at the time, and make a whole book out of it. Thousands of people will read and understand and use it to explain, in an imaginative sense, some of their own trouble. We all suffer terrible losses, we all go through the troubles of life. The purpose of art is to put them in a context so we can see not just the troubles but the meaning of them, where they came from and where they lead. It isn't sorrow and trouble we can't stand, but meaningless sorrow, trouble that leads nowhere. A novel helps us all, including the writer himself, make sense of our lives.


. . .


The writer lives life more fully, more intensely and more sensitively than other people. But he does it through a screen or a glass and as you become older in writing, you find that the best things and the worst things that happen to you are on paper. I suppose that is what art is all about. It's a transfer of life, from living and breathing, to some other medium where it can be seen more steadily, and at the same time with feeling but without the intense pain, without the numbing, blinding and terrifying pain that life gives you. It enables you and your readers to pass through experiences which you could hardly survive in life, but which in fiction can leave you not only unhurt, but even enhanced with more understanding of what life is. 

I was struck so powerfully by those two paragraphs that I had to stop reading then and there. I wanted to leap up and start pacing around (pacing is actually how I write. Like Mr. Earbrass in Edward Gorey's The Unstrung Harp, I belong to the "straying, not sedentary" type of writer and am rarely to be found at the keyboard unless I am actually typing something).

But Patches was sleeping contentedly on my lap, and I didn't want to disturb her. All I could do was turn my head and look out through the porch widows at the stand of trees that I am slowly growing attached to, drifting in the breeze.

Suddenly I realized why I'm still not ready to return to work on my novel-in-progress, and the knowledge brought tears and hyperventilation.

The pivotal (not main) title character has just lost his job, his only means of livelihood, and is in the process of losing his sense of self altogether. I'm at the point in the story where it is about to get very much worse. He is about to lose absolutely everything in a tidal wave of chaos that will push him right over the edge.

I can't write that scene now. My own recent tidal wave is still too close in the rear-view mirror. The perspective of distance is required.

The very next thing I read in Mr. Millar's book was the beginning of another piece. It read:

Knowing exactly where he is is as important to a writer as it is to a blind man. To most of us, loss of place is as radical as loss of vision: we seem to be able to see only what we know.

I can feel that I've begin to set down roots in this new universe, but they aren't strong yet. That takes time.

-- Freder.

Dawn of the Braindead

The view from my desk,

It's impolitic to type this, and I've kept my typing fingers quiet on the subject until now, but today was Day Four of Book Rush, and they were out in force, wave after wave of them, the Born Yesterdays and the Never Had A Clues and the Think I Know Much More Than I Actually Do's.

Yes, it's true: most college students really do have all the brains of a tapeworm.

I can cut the freshmen some slack. They're on their own, probably for the first time, probably feeling overwhelmed. I can sympathize. But the upperclassmen -- they have no excuse! They've done this before.

The most common question I get asked, roughly on the order of a couple hundred times a day during book rush, is "Can I buy my books down here or do I have to go upstairs?" Even the parents sometimes ask that one.

I want to know what it is about my workspace that reminds them even vaguely of a cashier's station. Could it be the chest-high wall surrounding me that so discourages that kind of activity? Could it be the total absence of those cheery cash register sounds? Could it be the barricade of notebooks currently stacked in front of the space, making it virtually impossible for anyone to get close enough to conduct a transaction?

The ones I like the best are the ones who don't even ask. They just come up here and stare at me expectantly, then cautiously raise their books and try to hand them over.

Hmm. Yes, I see you have books. Pretty ones. Nice.

I like to let them stew a little bit before I ask, "Can I help you?"

They have to go upstairs anyway to get out of here, so what's the big deal?

Beside me here is the Emergency Exit. It's got two Big Red Signs right at eye level that read, "EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY -- ALARM WILL SOUND." Just in case, there are two more signs just above the handbar that say the same thing in big red letters. Yet on the first day of Book Rush, no less than three  students and one adult went barreling through that door, yes, setting off the alarm. It is a really loud and annoying alarm by the way. In order to make it stop I have to walk around the front of the booth, stand directly under that noise, and key it off. Did I mention that it gets louder and louder the longer it screams?

And someone did it again today. I was right in the middle of going through a pre-order box with another student. I'm afraid they knew that I was pissed. It's kind of hard to hide in the initial wake of jumping right out of your skin.

My question is, "If you can't read, what the hell are you doing in college?"

There's also the phenomenon, not limited to the students, of turning easy, simple questions into a novel by Dostoyevsky. "Once upon a time there was this and that and the other thing and my grandmother's second cousin on her father's side recommended a book to me, it's a red book with spots and it's about an inch think, I don't know what it's about or what the title is or who the author is, but it's for some class, I don't know the course number." All bookstore people are familiar with this. The challenge is to filter out the extraneous and figure out what the person is really asking for. This can be made extra-difficult when they speak in a halting, roundabout way, or if they speak in a monotone, or in a whisper, or as if they have a mouthful of marbles. In short, the way most students speak.

My favorite Idiotic Question so far this semester is: "I bought this book at Amazon but it hasn't arrived yet. Is there any way I can just borrow this one for two weeks?"

It wins for being a Double Play: not only is it a Very Deeply Idiotic Question Indeed, but it shows that the student really was raised in a barn and has no moral compass whatever.

This morning another student made a point of bragging out loud that she got a lot of her books "for cheap on Amazon."

Our textbook program is structured to break even, not to make a profit. I wish that we could put a sign up to that effect, broadcast it to the students. The bookstore is not ripping you off. There's no doubt that textbooks are a Racket, but it's the publishers and wholesalers behind it, not us. Amazon is selling the books at a lower price than we have to pay for them. Who knows how they make a profit?

The students stand on the stairway and have conversations, blocking the way for people who need to get through.

They walk sloooowwwly  two and three abreast, blocking the halls. 

The personal hygiene of many of them is definitely in question.  It's hard to answer student questions when you're holding your breath.

We bore ourselves silly making the same speeches over and over, trying to drill into their thick heads, "Keep your receipt! You can't return anything without your receipt!" And yet today, just four days in, a student came up to me and said: "I need to return my books and I don't have my receipt."

Enjoy the books, Chumley.

They don't moan or drool or eat human flesh, but sometimes it seems as if they are intent on devouring one's Immortal Soul.

Like today.

Go forth, students! Go forth and PLEASE don't multiply.

-- Freder.

Holes. . . and a Discovery

I couldn't understand why the palm of my right hand hurt so much yesterday. It was over-all ouchie, but just at the base of my thumb it was particularly painful and red. I wondered about it all day. Then, around dinnertime, the coin finally dropped: on Saturday I dug two hundred and sixty holes in my lawn with a hand trowel. DUH! You think?

I'm a slow thinker. When rapid decisions are called for, I usually just freeze. If they got me on Hell's Kitchen, I'd probably just stand there with a spatula in my hand looking bewildered and repeating to myself, over and over again, "Oh my god! Oh my god!"


"Wake up!" Chef Ramsay would shout.  "What the **** are you doing?!"

"Yes, Chef! Sorry, Chef! Oh my god! Oh my god!"

Anyway. Two hundred and sixty holes exactly. I counted them.

A Hole is to Dig. I'm sure that my neighbors thought I was crazy, especially when I started in digging holes along the strip of grass beside the road. But I was planting daffodil bulbs. My father left a plastic bucket full of them on my doorstep. It's more than likely that some won't make it, but with any luck my yard will be dotted with daffodils next spring.

Most people plant daffodils in garden beds. But out at the old house we had a section of the back yard that was full of them every spring. My mother used to say that planting daffodils in that section of lawn was the best thing my father ever did.

I'm taking the idea one step further. I'm going to have daffodils all around my house. Don't know how I'll mow the lawn, but I'll figure that out when the time comes.

By the time I was done, having cut the grass just prior to the planting, I was so shagged out that I flopped on the porch and just evaporated. My shoulders were complaining bitterly at my treatment of them. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel it pounding against the back of the couch. But, yeah, it was a good kind of tired.

Today we've had two periods of torrential rain, so my daffodils are getting a good soaking.

Next, the hosta has to come out, to make way for hydrangeas. I don't think that's going to happen right away!

*

Yesterday I bought a combination printer and scanner. I wasn't planning on doing it. It was just there, with a sign overhead that said $49. I couldn't believe they were serious. Ah, but t probably doesn't work with a Mac, I tthought. Checked the box. Yes, it does! It's been so long since I was able to print or scan anything at home; even so, I stood there and thought about it for several minutes. I told you; I'm a slow thinker.

Later in the evening, printer / scanner ensconced and software installed, I cast around for something to test the scanning bit with. I finally settled on the black and white portrait of Mom that's been sitting in my kitchen here ever since I moved in. It was taken by her sister-in-law, my Aunt Sharron, maybe twenty-plus years ago, and is hands down the best portrait of her that I have.

In the process of taking it out of the frame, I found three more photos concealed underneath it. Photos that I had no memory of ever seeing before. All of them terrific. In one of them, she's seated on a wooden rocking horse with her brother, my Uncle John, standing beside her.

But my absolute favorite of the lot is the one that's heading up this post. Maybe it's that she's standing inside the "hoosegow" that's out in my back yard right now. Maybe it's because I've come to think of the structure as "my TARDIS," and this makes me feel as if she's just popping off for a bit, out for another lark in time and space, you know it's bigger in here than it is on the outside, possibility, possibility, possibility, see you later.

Maybe it's because she looks happier than I ever saw her, ever, in the last five years of her life.

I'm not putting it back behind the other pictures. This one deserves a frame of its own.

-- Freder.

By Any Other Name

I try to be brutally honest in most things here on the blog; but sometimes (like this morning) it seems as though I'm writing around the point, rather than getting to it. Not being deliberately misleading. Just not getting it.

There's something that I'm missing.

Does anyone else ever feel this way? As if the monster is standing right behind you, but no matter every which way you turn, you can't manage to see it?

Just like a movie, really. The audience can see the monster, but the character can't -- until it's too late.

*

At work on a Sunday. Seems pointless, really. Perhaps things will pick up as the day rolls on, perhaps the upperclassmen will start to return. Even so, it seems silly to be here at eight bloody o'clock in the morning when the campus is deader than Rock Hudson.

*

Ah, now. Speaking of Death. Although I sometimes personalize him (or her, depending on my mood), I dislike euphemisms for death, especially since my mother's.

"Passed Away" isn't the worst; the "away" part at least acknowledges the truth. But "Passed" or "Passing" to me smacks of Magical Thinking -- as though your loved one isn't gone. . . just, you know, moved sideways into another dimension.

To say that they are "with God now." That's the worst. Surely, if you are Of The Faith. you have to believe that all of us are with God, all of the time, all of our lives. What then is the purpose of this phrase? Does anyone really believe that our dearly departed are gleefully cavorting on the playground in the clouds with the Bearded Old Man watching over them like a benevolent parent? Does anyone really believe that our dead are busily having tea parties with Jesus in the stratosphere?

"Called Home." What does that mean? My mother's home was here with me. She wasn't called. She was taken.

"Crossed Over."  The Styx aside, death isn't a river that one ferries across, to emerge on the other side, Just the Same, only in a Different Place.

I have a hard time saying "dead" and "died," too, and have to force myself to type it, as when I had to write about my Uncle Orly earlier this week.

The word that I feel, the word that I know, is "Gone." It's the only honest word, the only word that expresses the emptiness. We like to imagine that our loved ones are "in a better place," but the reality is that they aren't where we want them to be: here, with us. How can death be a better place when what it means is the absence of life?

At their worst, euphemisms for death can even be used to justify the taking of life. I've been feeling well alone, in this past decade, with my belief that George Bush did a terrible thing when he invaded Iraq, and that President Obama has been wrong not to bring a swift end to it. Two wrongs don't make a right. All life is sacred. It's galling to know that the same people who want to outlaw abortion are perfectly OK with killing as many Muslims as possible. When Jimmy Carter declared with a smile that "Today, we are at peace," I was one of the ones who snickered -- because I believed that it was finally and for all time evident to the plainest idiot that War is never the answer. Now look at us. Carter's peace was a bigger accomplishment than I believed.

I've said good-bye so many times that it's become monotonous, a litany of goodbyes, like a string of Hail Marys assigned in penance: "Say a thousand goodbyes and call me in the morning."

Say a million goodbyes.

Say ten million goodbyes.

Keep on saying goodbye. . . until it's your turn.

In my case, there isn't going to be anyone left here to miss me. That's probably for the best. I'd hate to be responsible for anyone feeling the kind of sadness and loss that I feel on a daily basis.

-- Freder.

The Spy

Here it is: the stupid little comedy I shot more than three decades ago, and finally completed this summer with its first and only post production.

Don't Go Back There

Television on my computer? Now that I've tried it, I'm not a big fan. It is quite the Brave New World, though, to discover that your computer really is a Time Machine.

The first TV that I watched full screen on my computer was Doctor Who. I was just discovering Stephen Moffat's re-imagining of the show, wanted to see the episodes that he wrote for the David Tennant years, but didn't like Russell Davies' Who well enough to pay fifty to seventy-five dollars for the full seasons. At a buck ninety nine an episode, I was willing to make an exception to the rule of "No telly on the iMac."

These five or six episodes really cemented my enthusiasm for Moffat's Who, but the viewing experience is nowhere near as good as that of watching a DVD on a high-def set. The resolution is notably lower, there are the glitches caused by dreaded vagaries of the interwebs -- and you can't share it, unless you allow your friends to log in as you. So taken was I with Matt Smith's debut on Who that I sat my father and his wife down in front of the telly and said, "Just watch." I'd have a hard time plunking folks down here in my study.

Cutting to the chase, last night I made two more exceptions. My friend DP has been singing the praises of Hulu, so I checked out the list of shows that they host. What to my wondering eyes should appear but Nanny and The Professor.

Watershed moment! Yes, really. Stop that snickering.

As a seven or eight year old kid I loved Nanny and the Professor, and adored Juliet Mills with the pure soul burning adoration that's only possible in childhood (actually both of the Mills sisters have been objects of my ardent puppy love at one time or another. Haley several times). Nanny and the Professor  is not now, nor has ever been available on DVD or VHS. I made that excited "sucking in of breath" sound that children used to make when they heard the ice cream truck coming down the street. I thought, "Nanny and the Professor! I'm in!!"

Alas, you really can't go back. While Ms. Mills remains as puppy-lovable as ever (though I see more calculation in her performance than I did when I was eight years old), and Richard Long brings everything he's got to the table to sell the thing, Nanny and the Professor is really just an awful, terrible, no good, very bad show. Looking at it with adult eyes, I have to wonder how it stayed on the air for two seasons! Or how the pilot episode ever sold in the first place!

I was never deluded that it was anything other than a down-market Mary Poppins, but it never seemed so very down in that market back in the day. The adult cast all do what they can, but the writing is lowest-common-denominator, the direction hideous, and those children -- egad! All of their dialogue is overdubbed, and many of their scenes look like they were cobbled together from the only useable takes lifted from other, differently planned scenes.

But the thing that really annoyed me was the little musical trill, the cue that they use every time Juliet Mills does something "magical."

She guesses the children's names correctly.

*TRILL!*

She talks to the dog.

*TRILL!*

She knows that someone is at the door.

*TRILL!*

It's the producer's way of saying "GET it?" {nudge, nudge, trill.} "GET it? Nanny is MAGICAL, see! SEE? Did you GET that she just did something MAGICAL?"

Just how dumb did they think the audience was?

Oh my, what a crashing disappointment. Until last night I would have been first in line to buy any DVD release of this show. Now that I've ridden the Wayback Machine across the televisual timestream, any DVD release of this is going to have me running in the opposite direction. Not even prurient thoughts about Juliet Mills would make it worthwhile. Yeesh, even H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville have aged better than Nanny.

There's something uniquely disappointing in discovering that as a child you had all the taste and standards of a toadstool. It makes me wary about trying to "rediscover" some of my other televisual favorites from that era, stuff like The New Adventures of Tom and Huck (I had such a crush on the girl who played Becky Thatcher, plus the body of the show was a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, plus Injun Joe was played by Ted Cassidy, Lurch from The Addams Family -- what, I say what was not for an eight year old to like?). Stuff like Mister Terrific, and Captain Nice. Stuff like Here Come the Double Deckers and The Partridge Family.

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, once Nanny had ended I cast around Hulu for some more lousy TV. And I found it.

I was vaguely aware that someone had made a cable series out of the Swamp Thing movies, and was curious enough about it to consider, a time or two, buying the DVD. Oh my! Thank goodness that never happened!

The original Swamp Thing comics are pretty good, and this looked to be hewing closer to the source material than the movies. Also, the first Swamp Thing movie is about as good as a really tacky, ugly, bad movie can be. Hulu has the series as part of their line-up. I had the time. Let's check it out!

I knew that I was in trouble from the first shot, which showed a dwarf tied upside down onto a pole in the middle of the swamp. It got worse. Why would you shoot a kid boating through the swamp from inside the bottom of the boat, with nothing but a cloudless sky for a background? Obviously, because your budget is so low that you're probably shooting the scene in a wading pool.

The dialogue! Oh my god! Dialogue is supposed to accomplish certain purposes, and this went in the opposite direction. And the way it's delivered by the "actors"! There's not a natural intonation anywhere within hearing. Rarely have I seen TV this bad, and it's not even good-bad. The writer, director, producer, cast and crew must all have been either drunk or on drugs when they made this lame-ass excuse for a TV show. The production values are so slight that the original Swamp Thing movie looks like Star Wars by comparison -- and it was strictly a poverty-row production.

I thank Hulu for saving me money, but even though it hadn't cost me a penny, I still felt cheated. Their line-up includes several other shows that I've long been curious about. . . but tonight, I'm feeling my curiosity draining away as surely as if someone had pulled the plug in my low-budget wading pool.

-- Freder.