Another Week: Number 134

Around here, we persevere.

Sure, the air on Sunday was all milky and orange with the smoke from Canadian wildfires as it often is these days, but my brother-in-law’s birthday party went on as scheduled, and it was a nice afternoon on the shore of Camp Lake. Four of Amy’s sisters and one brother-in-law even made the trip. I stayed long enough to experience the joy of driving home on winding country roads in the dark.

So much of my time these days is spent on chores. There’s laundry, cooking, dishes, shopping, housecleaning, trimming, edging, mowing, fertilizing, weeding, filling bird feeders, software updates, writing this crap, and so on. I try to schedule all of this this the best I can, with mixed results.

Spreading fertilizer on my lawn in Wednesday’s humidity left me soaked with sweat. Thursday, though, was the cool and cloudy break I had been hoping for. I got hours of weeding finished, and trimmed my front-yard yews the same afternoon.

Friday, I rescued a weigela that was getting swallowed by a previous neighbor’s grapevines — and I even spent some quality time turning my compost hill with a steel spade.

Later that evening, my body threatened to die. Activities that were routine when I was 45 are more taxing 20 years later. Even my usual walk at Petrifying Springs on Monday knocked me a little dizzy and limp near the end, thanks to the smoke and the dew point.

Donald J. Trump is getting older too. On Thursday, the White House announced he has chronic venous insufficiency. He’s also got a growing scandal over his flip-flop regarding the “Epstein files.” Common sense tells me that Trump must crash and burn spectacularly one day — but so far, he’s survived countless heinous scandals and 34 felony convictions with zero consequences, and this week he was celebrating the cancellation of Stephen Colbert and the defunding of public broadcasting.

I had been very disappointed by the way that NPR and PBS chose to normalize Trump for years until he threatened them specifically. Now they suddenly sense disaster.

Here’s an idea: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting cutback was $1.1 billion. Elon Musk is worth $419.9 billion. He could bankroll public broadcasting for the next four years as a benevolent gesture. Every show would begin with an “And by … Elon Musk” funding credit. It would go a long way toward rehabilitating his badly damaged image with the Tesla-buying elites, and it would drive Donald Trump bonkers.

The hummingbird has been visiting my feeder regularly. On Wednesday, she buzzed my head as I sat eating an apple on my back step.

I walked 2.71 miles this week.

Your Friends and Neighbors (Apple TV+)

I finished out my three-month Apple TV+ deal watching this series starring Jon Hamm as a “Coop,” a fired hedge-fund financier who resorts to burglarizing the neighbors in his elite New York City suburb.

It’s an interesting supposition, and there’s a strong cast — but ultimately, this series is another slice of lovely slop like many other Apple TV+ offerings.

There’s a rut some shows fall into that I think of as “Dragnet dialog,” because Jack Webb wrote the same terse speech pattern for every single character in his detective franchise. Your Friends and Neighbors has a similar flaw, with most of the characters voicing exposition and advancing the plot more like narrators hurriedly taking turns than like people.

The two exceptions are Coop’s sister, played by Lena Hall, a bipolar girl with a guitar who seems to have wandered in from a Rachel Dratch sketch, and Hamm himself, when poorly reading his own faux-philosophical self-narration.

At its heart, Your Friends & Neighbors is mostly a bad soap opera. Playing Coop’s ex-wife, Amanda Peet is somewhat shrill and overwrought. These days, Coop is hooking up with Olivia Munn, so there’s one triangle — and even an obligatory catfight.

But mixed into the melodrama is a fetish for expensive watches, some lame social commentary about the empty lives of the rich, some menacing organized crime, moths out of a horror film, two vacant teenage offspring, a dead body, and a Maserati trunk that comedically pops open several hundred times.

The best element here is Randy Danson as Lu Varga, a pawnshop proprietor and possibly the toughest old broad I’ve seen onscreen since Geraldine Page in The Pope of Greenwich Village.

But this show has no idea what it wants to be. Halfway into the season finale, an officer named Hernandez admits, “I sound like a TV cop.” The episode ends with a twist that teases Season 2 while the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” plays to make you think you just watched Goodfellas or something.

It’s good-looking, in focus, and the cast is fine — but Jonathan Tropper‘s pasable premise quickly gets lost in the shrubbery.