I feel bad for the people who spent a lot of time planning, organizing and arranging events for Independence Day yesterday. In the greater Houston area, most of these things were canceled on account of the torrential rain we received, starting in the early morning hours and lasting until late afternoon. It wasn’t terrible where we live, just several hours of solid rain of the sort we rarely get around here. It typically pours for 15 minutes instead of raining gently like that for hours. With the attendant thunder and lightning, parades and concerts were all canceled, although the fireworks went off. One of the best metaphors is this image from the Houston Chronicle, where the letters spelling “Houston” float away from the concert grounds in floodwaters.
After watching “The City on the Edge of Forever” for the first time in a long time (it holds up reasonably well), we dove into the new Lost in Space. We only saw the first couple of episodes, but we’re enjoying it. I like the way they reimagined the story, giving the characters some new backstories and treating the teenagers like real (but exceptional) teenagers.
Our daughter posted about Hannah Gadsby’s standup show on Netflix, so we decided to watch. It’s an experience we won’t soon forget. Gadsby talks about discovering she was “a little bit lesbian” while growing up in very conservative Tasmania, and the problems she’s had throughout her life, in part because of the guilt she was immersed in during her formative years, when homosexuality was both a sin and illegal. Her hour-long set starts out mostly funny, but then it transitions into something quite different. At first it becomes a meta-analysis of stand-up comedy. How comedians like her get laughs by deliberately creating tension and then releasing it with something funny. However, she came to believe that her self-deprecating form of humor was damaging, trapping her ideas about herself in an unhealthy state. She refers back to one of her earlier jokes, a story about how she stood up to a homophobic guy, and reveals that that story was incomplete. The rest of the tale is not in the least bit funny. She is angry and bitter, and the audience experiences a new kind of tension. It’s all designed to make a point (and, perhaps, announce her plans to retire from standup, although he has, admittedly, given that a bit of re-think after the attention her show has garnered), but the anger is real. Definitely recommended (fair warning: the language can curl your hair).
We followed that up with Ali Wong’s first Netflix show (Baby Cobra), which is a very different creature altogether. She’s crude and outspoken and pretty hilarious.
