Happy Thanksgiving! It is I Gigi the parti poodle here to welcome you to this week’s blog. Our beloved neighborhood Persian cat Demeter is still missing. The pets in my neighborhood decided to go down to the park to look for clues this week. It was a bit of a challenge as the Dachshund twins Tyler and Titus were more interested in the climbing apparatus and swings instead of looking for our dear missing friend. We did manage to get them to focus on business after providing treats for them. We searched all around the park while it was not raining. I despise being outside in the rain. Everyone was downtrodden at not being able to find anything.

And then, as luck would have it, Charlotte the chow found something: a heart shaped metal tag with Demeter’s name engraved on it. We were stunned. Ruffles the bulldog picked it up in his teeth and we all watched it dangle off his lower fang. Bruiser, the Jack Russell Terrier, was very excited about this and began jumping up and down realizing we had found our first clue to Demeter’s whereabouts. Either her captor had taken the tag off her collar and tossed it in the park or perhaps kidnapped her and came to the park to toss the tag there to take anyone who was looking for her off the kidnapper’s track. Artemis, Demeter’s sister thought this was the place she had been kidnapped because she had noticed Demeter’s tag had started working its way loose from its split ring.

Edison the Manx was skeptical. It is difficult to get a cat or dog tag loose from a split ring. But Madeline the British Shorthair was quite certain it was possible. She admitted to catching her split ring on her claw once while playing on her cat apparatus. Bruiser suggested perhaps there was someone in the neighborhood who had been watching Demeter before stalking and kidnapping her. That we may all be in trouble. I suggested to them we all reconvene after Thanksgiving after pondering the possibilities. Until next week I bid you adieu.

MY BOOKS

You can check out my books Chicane and all five installments of the Musicology book series Musicology: Volume One, Baby!, Musicology: Volume Two, Kid!, Musicology: Volume Three, Twist!, Musicology: Volume Four, Sweetie! and Musicology: The Epiquad on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback editions. You can also check out Musicology’s web site at www.musicologyrocks.com and vote for who you think will win Musicology!

STREAM OF THE WEEK: SLOW HORSES (2022)-APPLE +

Some Apple shows have an uncanny ability to disappoint their audience. A few of note that took a nosedive were Severance in its second season by giving away too many secrets and having no patience whatsoever referring to of course that awful snow episode, and Ted Lasso in its fourth and fifth seasons by not delivering what it hinted at starting in season one. No payoff = complete failure and little to no awards. How do two shows that started out phenomenally end up falling so hard on their faces? Foundation has had Issac Asimov rolling in his grave since episode one with insipid ideas like “feeling the math”. Are you kidding me? What scientist feels the math? The reason for these fiery crashes into mountains stems primarily from the fact that most Hollywood writers, especially those who work for Apple, though good in comedy and drama, fail miserably when it comes to niche writing like science fiction and mystery. Especially science fiction because apparently, they don’t believe in doing their research or consulting with scientists because, frankly, they refuse to understand science (see also Severance). I hate to break it to you but 99.999% of managers (Cobel) cannot come up with science of any kind. And neither could her character. Managers = traditionalists who stalwartly cling to the past. Those are not the kind of individuals who are going to discover the next scientific breakthrough.

That said, the witty, sharp, always entertaining Slow Horses is worth the watch. The show is based on the Slough House book series by Mick Herron and developed for television by Will James Smith who delivers a well-done spy show with excellent acting and solid writing. Herron came up with the idea for the books based on his commuting to work during the time of the bombings in London in 2005.

Slough House is a place where British MI5 agents go after they have either failed or embarrassed the British Intelligence service. The place is an unassuming dump of a building in London and is headed up by Jackson Lamb (beautifully played by Gary Oldman) a brilliant but chronic slob who, when called on, sends his rejects out into the field. Most recent failure is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden who is also excellent here) a young twenty something hotshot who failed in his final stages of becoming M15 and ended up shutting down a major passenger railway terminus.

Also relegated to Slough House are Sidonie ‘Sid’ Baker (Olivia Cooke), Min Harper (Dustin Demri-Burns), Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan), and Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) who has known Lamb for a long time.

In Season One, shortly after River’s arrival a young comedian Hassan Ahmed (Antonio Aakeel), son of a powerful family, is kidnapped and his captors are threatening to behead him. The kidnapping turns out to be a setup by MI5 head Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) who has an inside man on the case. But when Diana’s inside man has a major catastrophic incident, she must call on Lamb and his agents to straighten out the fiasco.