If, like me, you are worried about the spread of H5N1 avian influenza then you will want to have a look at The Transmission, a site produced by the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Their Unofficial HPAI H5N1 Map is sourced from "from FAO EMPRES, USDA APHIS, WAHIS, and open source news reports beginning in late 2022 to current" and is quite sobering. Until I viewed it, I hadn't realized how extensive the outbreaks were in North America.
As well as H5N1, the site contains information on other emerging infectious diseases, including Marburg virus, and of course, COVID-19.
If you're still on Twitter, you can follow Claudine Miller, an analyst at the Center.
Thanks to BoingBoing for pointing me to The Transmission.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
Along the lakeshore
We’re All Living Under Gravity’s Rainbow. "Looming apocalypse. Paranoid conspiracies. Rocket-obsessed oligarchs. As Thomas Pynchon’s novel turns 50, its world feels unnervingly present." It would be interesting to compare Gravity's Rainbow to John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.
The Bill C-18 Reality: Everyone Loses When the Government Mandates Payments for Links. "The report that Google is conducting a national test that removes links to Canadian news sites for a small percentage of users sparked a predictable reaction as politicians who were warned that Bill C-18 could lead to this, now want to know how it could happen. None of this week’s developments should come as a surprise. Bill C-18 presents Google and Facebook with a choice: pay hundreds of millions of dollars primarily to Canadian broadcasters for links to news articles or stop linking."
Ode to Samuel Delany. "Composed half-a-century ago, The Ballad of Beta-2 was a science-fiction vision of the future that speaks directly to our present."
MIT team makes a case for direct carbon capture from seawater, not air. "The oceans soak up enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, and MIT researchers say they've developed a way of releasing and capturing it that uses far less energy than direct air capture – with some other environmental benefits to boot."
Bell Canada's contractors have been busy wiring up our neighbourhood for their Fibe fibre optic service. Most of the work involves tunneling under the lawns and installing vaults for equipment. They haven't got to our house yet. It will be interesting to see how they hook our our townhouses considering that we have a paved driveway and boulevard instead of a front lawn.
I processed the RAW file in Lightroom to boost the colour a bit and changed the film simulation from Provia to Velvia. The composition is a bit off-centre, but I was standing in the middle of the road trying to keep an eye out for traffic.
Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 WR, F5.6 at 1/500 second, ISO 400, Velvia film simulation
This week we have a rather pleasant concert from Mark Knopfler. I've enjoyed his music since Dire Straits in the 80s. Brothers in Arms was one of the first CDs I bought and it still holds up pretty well. About 10 years ago, I won tickets to see him in Toronto. It was an excellent concert with a crackerjack band and good sound. His performance of "Romeo and Juliet" was one of the most beautiful things I've heard at a big rock concert and earned him a well-deserved standing ovation.
This video seems to be a mix of pro- and fan-shot recording from multiple cameras. The sound is good, I'm guessing from a soundboard. The setlist spans Knopfler's career from Dire Straits and on, the band is more than capable of doing justice to the songs, and Knopfler hits all the right notes. It's a good concert and I wish I could have been there.
There have been confirmed human cases of H5N1 avian influenza in Cambodia. It seems likely that they are due to direct contact with infected birds, but if not, it could be a serious problem.
An 11-year-old girl in Cambodia has reportedly died after contracting H5N1 avian influenza, also known as bird flu, while her father has also tested positive for the virus. It appears to be the second confirmed human death linked to a surge in cases among birds and mammals since 2020, and this is the first documented human outbreak of H5N1 in the country in nearly a decade. Officials are now testing the family’s close contacts, some of whom have shown symptoms, but it is unclear whether these cases were spread from person to person or through a shared exposure to infected animals.
Things are not going well for British salad lovers right now. Produce shelves are bare and stores are rationing sales of fresh produce. The government blames bad weather in Spain and Morocco for tomato shortages while television news shows clips of revelers at a Spanish festival awash in tomatoes.
“It’s important to make sure that we cherish the specialisms that we have in this country,” Coffey told parliament. “A lot of people would be eating turnips right now rather than thinking necessarily about aspects of lettuce and tomatoes and similar.”
With a love of turnips more commonly associated with the long-suffering manservant Baldrick in Blackadder, Coffey handed her critics the kind of material they could normally only dream of.
It's likely that bad weather is not the real cause of the produce shortages in Britain. Other countries, such as the Netherlands, appear to be awash in produce. More likely, it's the added bureaucracy and energy costs caused by Brexit and the Ukrainian war that are resulting in empty shelves.
In addition to the lack of action to help growers with high energy prices, experts believe the UK’s complex supply chains have equally contributed to the situation, showing room for improvement.
However, Pekka Pesonen, Secretary General of Copa-Cogeca, a European agricultural umbrella organisation, said “tipping the delicate balance of trade channel” should have been avoided.
“The main message to the UK would be that our food supplies are highly integrated, highly complex set of measures all across all operators, all regions, countries and even outside the Union,” Pesonen said. “Disturbing this delicate balance, even if it's a minor change to the supply routes and supply chains, it may have a significant impact through operators that opt for the easier way somewhere else.”
We’re very excited to bring you the Analog Analytical Laboratory finalists. Available below are the works that finished in the top five slots for Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Fact Article, and Best Poem, and the those that finished in the top three for Best Novella and Best Cover. Although we won’t be announcing the winners until our July/August issue, finalists are listed below in alphabetical order by title. If you missed any pieces when they were first published in Analog, just click on the appropriate link below.
The Analog contest (known as the AnLab) has been running since the 1940s and the Asimov's poll for 37 years. Winners receive a cash bonus and some egoboo.
The best part: All the stories and articles are linked to PDFs that you can download or read online. There's lots of good science fiction, science fact, and poetry to go through here.
There's a new news site devoted to Ontario politics: The Trillium. For those of you outside the province, the trillium is the official flower of Ontario.
It's run by Village Media which also runs many local news sites like Soo Today, which I follow to keep up with what's going on in the Sault.
I don't know if they have a political slant. (If Soo Today is any indication they're not right-wing).
There's been a lot of news about balloons in the past couple of weeks. It may seem like something new, but scientists and weather researchers have been using them for many years. Thousands are launched every week around the world, mostly without notice or incident.
For the curious, Naturehas a guide to some of the different types of balloons and how they are used.
Balloons are a valuable tool for getting a good view downwards or upwards, from an altitude higher than drones or planes can reach and at a lower cost than satellites.
By far the majority are weather balloons: these are launched twice a day simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide, according to the US National Weather Service. They transmit data about temperature, humidity, pressure and location, and are disposable. The thin balloons — typically made of biodegradable latex — expand at altitude to about 6 metres in diameter. Flights are designed to go straight up to about 30 kilometres, and last for only a few hours.
Some scientists use much larger, longer-lasting balloons, for example to get a clear view of space, or to test instruments destined for high altitudes. NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia manages the launch of about 10–15 scientific balloons each year worldwide. These can carry around 3,000 kilograms, expand to be larger than a football stadium and fly to an altitude of 37 kilometres.
People are trying to destroy automated speed cameras in and around Toronto. "A medley of cameras in and around the city have been trashed, tipped over, spray-painted and just generally destroyed by vandals, seemingly to spare themselves and other drivers from speeding tickets." I've seen this happen in my neighbourhood. I would like to see all cars outfitted with a black box that checks where the car is and won't let the driver exceed the speed limit. Driving is a privilege, not a right.
SpaceX prioritizes Starship test flights, pauses plans for floating launch pads. "President and COO Gwynne Shotwell says that SpaceX has temporarily abandoned plans for floating Starship launch platforms to ensure it’s fully focused on gaining flight experience with the next-generation rocket." It's a good thing SpaceX has an adult in the room, unlike Twitter.
We had a light dusting of snow Friday morning and I saw this when I had to let the dog out. There had been some freezing rain too so it all froze solid. Can you see the paw prints?
This is straight out of the camera using the Tri-X 400 film recipe.
Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 20 mm., F5.6, 1/100 second, ISO 1250, Tri-X 400 film simulation
I always liked the early Steely Dan albums and they were some of the first CDs that I bought when I got my first CD player. There was something about their mix of jazz, rock, and pop that appealed, though I lost interest after 1977's Aja.
Today's treat is a concert filmed in Nashville in 1993 with a crackerjack band, or orchestra, as Dan Fagen refers to it. With an extra guitarist, backup vocalists, and a horn section consisting of three sax players, the sound is full and jazzy. Despite protestations from the poster, the video and sound quality are quite good.
Here are some links to articles about photography that I found interesting or useful.
Winter trees at night
What is Dynamic Range in Photography? "In this article, with the goal of understanding the technical aspects of photography and photographic equipment, we will explore the particular phenomenon that is dynamic range."
How Are Webb’s Full-Color Images Made? "A lot of care is poured into processing the telescope’s full-color images, which begin as black-and-white exposures." This article is direct from the Webb telescope's website.
The Limits of ‘Computational Photography’. You may think your phone's pictures are wonderful but do they represent reality? And do how do they compare with images from a 'real' camera?
Complete guide to ISO: tips to boost your camera skills. "ISO is one of digital imaging’s superpowers. Giving you the freedom to shoot any time, anywhere and almost in any light. Will Cheung shows how you can harness its potential to improve your photography. Plus tips from James Abbott."
If you want to follow tech news, you would have a hard time finding a site better than techurls.com. This one got immediately added to my browser's bookmarks bar. Fair warning: It could be a time sink.
The site includes headlines from news articles from 27 tech news sites. The layout is basic but quite functional. It's a great way to scan a whole lot of news quickly. If you are looking for something specific, you can search the headlines. A search on "ChatGPT" turned up more than 100 articles, so it's obviously the topic du jour.
They also have several other news aggregator sites, including Linux, science, and developer news. Click on the site's hamburger menu to see a list.
Given the number of people who have died from COVID-19, it seems hard to believe that the actual number is higher, but studies indicate that is indeed the case. A recent article from The Conversation looks at the subject in more detail.
In a newly released study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, our team found that during the first two years of the pandemic – from March 2020 to February 2022 – there were between 996,869 and 1,278,540 excess deaths in the U.S. Among these, 866,187 were recognized as COVID-19 on death certificates. This means that there were between 130,682 and 412,353 more excess deaths than COVID-19 deaths. The gap between excess deaths and COVID-19 deaths was large in both the first and second years of the pandemic. This suggests that COVID-19 deaths were undercounted even after the pandemic’s chaotic early months.
Major studies have also concluded that excess deaths exceeded COVID-19 deaths at the national level during the first two years of the pandemic. And preliminary analyses by our team have found that the gap between excess deaths and COVID-19 deaths has persisted into the third year of the pandemic. This suggests that COVID-19 deaths are still being undercounted.
Provisional data show there were an estimated 53,741 excess deaths in Canada from the end of March 2020 to the end of August 2022, 7.6% more deaths than expected had there not been a pandemic. During this period, at least 42,215 deaths were directly attributed to COVID-19.
Given the many reports indicating that COVID-19 can have significant long-term negative effects on a wide range of bodily systems, including the heart and cardiovascular system, I expect that we will continue to see the death rate remain above pre-pandemic levels.
If you are worried about pandemics, I would keep an eye on this: a Marburg virus disease outbreak in Equatorial Guinea. From Wikipedia:
Marburg virus disease (MVD; formerly Marburg hemorrhagic fever) is a viral hemorrhagic fever in human and non-human primates caused by either of the two Marburgviruses: Marburg virus (MARV) and Ravn virus (RAVV).[3] Its clinical symptoms are very similar to those of Ebola virus disease (EVD).[1]
Despite what the article says, there is an experimental vaccine that has shown "promising results" in the first human trial.
Back in August of last year, I posted about couple of articles describing what could happen if California got hit by a mega storm similar to the one that flooded large parts of the state in 1862 Now the excellent Eye on the Storm blog has published a three-part series that goes into much more detail about the likelihood of such as storm reoccurring and what it would mean for California and the United States. They make for some sobering reading.
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. "OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?" The article is by Ted Chiang, the award-winning science fiction author who wrote the story that become the movie Arrival.
Single interferon injection halves severe COVID outcomes, trial shows. "A phase 3 randomized, controlled trial finds that a single injection of an experimental antiviral treatment slashed hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visits among high-risk COVID-19 patients when given soon after symptom onset."
Our Digital History Is at Risk. "Many have now seen how, when someone deletes their Twitter account, their profile, their tweets, even their direct messages, disappear. According to the MIT Technology Review, around a million people have left so far, and all of this information has left the platform along with them. The mass exodus from Twitter and the accompanying loss of information, while concerning in its own right, shows something fundamental about the construction of our digital information ecosystem: Information that was once readily available to you—that even seemed to belong to you—can disappear in a moment."
The low-light capabilities of modern cameras are impressive. I took this picture in our backyard at about 10:30 p.m. It was cloudy and had just been snowing so the sky was grey, not black, but it was still quite dark. The exposure was about .6 of a second and the camera's image stabilization still kept the image acceptably sharp.
Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 17 mm., F5.6 at 0.59 second, ISO 3200, Velvia film simulation
I was lying in bed Thursday night idly browsing Facebook and saw a post from James Keelaghan saying that his gig in British Columbia was being streamed live. That kept Nancy and I awake for an hour for the first set of his show at the Duncan Showroom. It was an excellent performance made even more enjoyable by the accompaniment of multi-instrumentalist David Woodhead.
If you aren't familiar with Keelaghan's music, I can't recommend it highly enough. Nancy and I first saw him at Harbourfront in 1986. Since then, we've seen him perform at least twenty times and have enjoyed every performance. His songs have been a soundtrack to our life for almost 40 years now. And do check out David Woodhead's music. He's an extraordinarily talented musician and is one of the best bass players I've ever seen.
The Duncan Showroom show has two sets. Sound and video are excellent as is the performance. I wish I had been there in person.
This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.
The fungal threat to human health is growing in a warmer, wetter, sicker world. "In the HBO show “The Last of Us,” characters identify zombies among them by the fungi that bursts from their bodies, and fungal parasites manipulate the humans to infect the communities around them. In real life, the fungal species that inspired the story, Ophiocordyceps, infects insects and does not cause problems for people. HBO, like CNN, is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery. However, the threat from fungal pathogens is increasing, experts say, and may grow much worse in a warmer, wetter and sicker world."
Locus magazine. the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, has published its 2022 Recommended Reading List.
We are so pleased to share this list of excellent fiction! Published in Locus magazine’s February 2023 issue, the list is assembled by Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. We looked at 982 titles from 2022 in short fiction and long fiction. The final recommendations, trimmed down to a somewhat reasonable-length list, are our best recommendations for your consideration. We know there will be titles you loved that do not appear here; it happens every year. Any one of our recommending group would have put together a different exact list, but this is the combined sum of opinions, assessed with great affection and care for the field. There were a lot of great books this year; we could’ve recommended twice as many.
There are a lot of books and short fiction to look at here. Out of the 30 or so novels in the science fiction novels category there are half a dozen that I've either bought already or plan on buying. Note that many of the short fiction entries, especially those originally published online, are linked and can be read online.
I've mused here a couple of times about how useful ChatGPT would have been when I was working at the TSX as a technical writer; for example, having it write drafts of VBA macros for Microsoft Word.
I'm not the only technical writer who is thinking about how they could use tools like ChatGPT. On her excellent CyberText Newsletter blog, Rhonda Bracey (@RhondaBracey@mastodon.social) has published a list that shows some of the things that editors (and technical writers) could do with ChatGPT. It's a long list and shows how ChatGPT and other similar tools could affect jobs in those fields.
Here is just one example (of many):
Rephrasing one or more sentences or paragraphs in several ways; for example:
rewrite in plain language
rewrite in a different voice (e.g. 1st, 2nd or 3rd person, or from a different point of view)
rewrite in a different tense (past, present, future)
rewrite for a different audience (e.g. ‘explain this to a 12 year old’, ‘summarise this for a CEO’)
rewrite to a word limit
And if you think this is just blue-sky thinking, Microsoft announced yesterday that ChapGPT will be integrated into its search engine, Bing, and the Microsoft 365 office suite.
As well as a list of uses, she writes at length about some of the pitfalls of using AI tools and has suggestions on how to mitigate risks. It's a solid, well-researched article that is worth taking the time to read and think about.
The photo of the full Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 is one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century. Colloquially known as the 'Blue Marble', it helped to kickstart environmental movements in the 1970s.
Now NASA has taken a new image from the Deep Space Climate Observatory and it shows some notable changes to the Earth since the original was taken 50 years ago. Even to my untrained eye, they're noticeable.
The Antarctic ice sheet has visibly reduced in size, even though the main losses to the Larsen ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula are not visible in this particular image. Differentiating between the permanent ice sheet and seasonal sea ice is also difficult. When the new photo was taken, sea ice was still in retreat from the previous winter.
While it can be hard to differentiate between snow and cloud in satellite images, in the original photo, some snow appears to be visible on the Zagros and Central mountain ranges in Iran (north of the Arabian Gulf). This snow has vanished entirely in the new image. However, this is again within the range of seasonal variation, and research has failed to identify any significant long-term trend in seasonal snow cover in Iran between 1987 and 2007.
Most striking is the reduction in dark green vegetation in the African tropics, particularly at their northern extent. The dark shadow of Lake Chad in the northern Sahara has shrunk, and forest vegetation now begins hundreds of miles further south.
If you have any appreciation for the historical timeframes of the Earth's evolution, this should give you pause. If you don't understand geologic timeframes, read The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen. It will rock your world.
9 Top Secret Features of the Free VLC Media Player. "VLC should be your media player of choice. The cross-platform tool has a bag full of secret features you can use right now." I have been using VLC for years and didn't know about some of these features.
S.D.A. Approves First Vaccine for Honeybees. "Dalan Animal Health’s vaccine for American foulbrood, an aggressive bacterial disease, is the first for any insect in the United States."
Awesome ChatGPT Prompts (Github link). "This is a collection of prompt examples to be used with the ChatGPT model."
Discovery of new ice may change our understanding of water. "Researchers at UCL and the University of Cambridge have discovered a new type of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other known ices and that may rewrite our understanding of water and its many anomalies." Fortunately, it's not Ice-nine.
Elon Musk teases expendable version of SpaceX’s reusable Starship rocket. "Once optimized, SpaceX says that Starship can launch up to 150 tons (330,000 lbs) to low Earth orbit while still recovering the orbital ship and suborbital booster for reuse. CEO Elon Musk has stated that Starship reuse will eventually take hours, enabling multiple flights per day for each ship and booster and dropping the marginal cost of each launch to just a few million dollars."
This morning it was -22C with a wind chill below -30C. (For those of you in the US, that's about -8F with a -22F wind chill.) So I did not go out for my usual morning walk. I can handle the cold but the wind could have given me frostbite. Fortunately, the extreme cold should only last for another day.
It seems appropriate that this week's picture should be from warmer times. These are black-eyed Susans from our backyard in August.
Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 WR at 45 mm., 1/125 second at F11, ISO 1600, Velvia film simulation
Today's musical treat goes back to the early 1970s. It was prime time for the San Francisco music scene and especially members of the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, and Crosby Stills Nash and Young. The loose conglomeration of musicians became nicknamed The Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra.
Starship founder Paul Kantner came up with the term "Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra", a label of reference to the San Francisco musicians that played on David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name. During the sessions for Crosby's album at Wally Heider Studios, the musicians of each band (who were working in other rooms) dropped in to the sessions and improvised hours of music, and everything was recorded. Some of the basic tracks played during these recorded sessions in 1971 were used for Crosby's album. Engineer Stephen Barncard and David Crosby made rough mixes of some of the session tapes, and in 1991 Graham Nash sent a DAT tape to Paul Kantner which later showed up in the tape trading markets as a 'pristine' digital copy. Barncard came up with the PERRO abbreviation when he needed to identify the 2 inch wide tapes on sides, standing vertically.
Pristine digital copies of the sessions at Wally Heider's Studio have circulated for years (I have two different versions in my music library.) and they are some of my favourite music from this period. Recently, on YouTube, I came across three excerpts from the sessions and I'm excerpting them here. They're a priceless view into one of the most creative musical periods in the history of rock music.
Jerry Garcia & David Crosby - The Perro Sessions - circa 1971
Here are links to some articles and web pages about writing and language resources.
From Nature, an article aimed at researchers and academics: Poor English skills? New AIs help researchers to write better. "Machine-learning tools can correct grammar and advise on the style and tone of presentations — but they must be used with caution."
From the Queen's University Accessibilty Hub, a web page with advice on creating accessible documents in several formats. "There are many forms of documents which are used during a learning session. These may include; Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft PowerPoint documents and PDF documents. All three types of documents can be used electronically, either during presentations or by offering students electronic versions of the documents to store and review. They can also be used in print format - as handouts during a session, for example. These documents may also include equations, charts, graphs, infographics, and tables which need to be accessible for all."
From the American Geophysical Union, Writing Plain Language Summaries. "A Plain Language Summary from a technical abstract may seem link a daunting task, it can help to expand the reach of your science by putting it in the hands of new audiences in language that they understand."
The Grammarphobia blog. "Grammar, etymology, usage, and more, brought to you by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman."
The Conscious Style Guide. "The first website devoted to conscious language. My mission is to help writers and editors think critically about using language—including words, portrayals, framing, and representation—to empower instead of limit. In one place, you can access style guides covering terminology for various communities and find articles debating usage. We study words so that they can become tools instead of unwitting weapons."
A Twitter thread by Mushtaq Bilal, PhD. "6 incredible resources developed by top universities to help you become a proficient academic writer — totally free:"
I've been using Mastodon more over the last month, especially since Twitter killed off third-party apps like Talon, the Android client that was my primary interface to Twitter. I still look at Twitter to follow a handful of accounts for information about COVID-19 and the Ukraine invasion, but the limitations of the official Twitter app and web interface make it difficult to use.
The official Android app and web client for Mastodon lack features that I used on Twitter. However, Mastodon, its API, and Activity Pub, its core protocol, are open source, so people have been busily extending it with new clients and add-on tools.
Here are a few that are useful.
Fedilab is the Android client that I currently use. I like it because it has one key feature lacking in the official Mastodon client. I can mute users who I've added to lists so they don't show up in my Home feed.
Mastodon List Manager is a "dead simple manager for all of your Mastodon Lists, letting you quickly assign people that you are following to one or more lists. Search, filter, and organize your follow list to make reasoning about your lists easy." Coupled with the muting feature in Fedilab, it makes lists much more useful.
Mastodon Threaded Reply Viewer is a simple web app that shows all of your posts and lets you view replies in a threaded format. It's handy but would be even better if it indicated which posts have replies. (You can view all of your posts (including boosts) in the Mastodon web app with a URL in this format: https://[your host]/@[your username], but the viewer is easier to use.
Finally, for those who are more technically adept, here's an article that shows how you can extend the Mastodon dashboard to show you your followers, the lists they belong to, and their recent posts. At the end of the article, there's a list of links to a series of articles about extending Mastodon to do new and interesting things.
Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in January.
Movies
Avatar 2: The Way of Water. It is an incredible cinematic experience in service of a 1940s pulp magazine plot. I enjoyed it for the wow factor and not much else.
The Detectorists Movie Special. The Detectorists return five years after the third-season with a made-for-tv movie special. This was one of our favourite shows when it was on and we were glad to see them back, even for a one-off. (Acorn TV)
Death in Paradise Christmas Special: Nothing new in the episode but it was enjoyable and the Christmas stuff was low-key. (BritBox)
TV Shows
Slow Horses (season 2): This wasn't quite as good as the first season because it was oriented more toward action and less toward character development. It was still very watchable. (Apple TV+)
Farewell Doc Martin: After 1- seasons Doc Martin finally came to a close. This retrospective gives a behind-the-scenes look at the show from the beginning to the final scene. (Acorn TV)_
Midsomer Murders: 25 Years of Mayhem. Another behind-the-scenes documentary, covering 25 years (and 23 seasons) of Britain's classic whodunnit. (Acorn TV)
Wednesday: I was never a big fan of the earlier Adams family TV shows, but this was pretty good, probably due to the involvement of Tim Burton. Thing was the highlight of the show. (Netflix)
Three Pines: This is based on a popular series of detective novels by Louise Penney and set in rural Quebec, just outside of Montreal. It's nice to see a Canadian setting and the use of important Canadian issues (residential schools, for example) in the story. It reminded me of the Australian series, Mystery Road, in that respect. It's not quite as good as the recent series, Cardinal, but still very watchable. (Amazon Prime)
The Rift: Bad things happen on a North Sea oil rig. It reminded me of 1899 but it's not filmed so darkly that I couldn't watch it. (Amazon Prime)
Father Brown (season 8): Another cozy mystery, this one featuring a Catholic priest as a detective in 1950s England. Not to be taken seriously. (BritBix)
Shetland (seasons 5 and 6): A police procedural set in the Shetland islands. This one can get grim but is very well done with complex plots and good characterization. You may need the closed captions. (BritBox)
Kaleidoscope: A standard heist series distinguished by the way the story is presented. You can watch the episodes in any order. We wimped out and decided to watch it in chronological order but decided not to continue after the first episode. (Netflix)
The Recruit: A lawyer joins the CIA and chaos ensues. If you like lighter, somewhat comedic thrillers then this is for you. Not so much for me. I just found it silly and not terribly funny. I guess that I was spoiled by Slow Horses. (Netflix)
Antiques Road Trips (season 18): This show gets a little cute at times but we like seeing the off-the-beaten-track places they go to in the quest for the perfect antiques. (PBS)
