Documentary on cheating at the highest levels of bridge

I am fond of the card game bridge, growing up in a bridge playing family and returning to it in retirement and playing a couple of times per week at my local club, formerly in person and now online. I enjoy the intellectual challenge posed by the game but never forget that it is a game and not worth getting all worked up about.

But many of the people who play it are severely competitive and I wrote about a recent cheating scandal involving a Grand Life Master. I just read of a new documentary just released called Dirty Tricks about the big 2015 scandal that rocked the world of bridge involving Lotan Fisher, someone considered the Michael Jordan of the game who possessed exceptional skills. He and his partner Ron Schwartz won millions of dollars playing in tournaments and with wealthy players like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
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Overcoming vaccine hesitancy

The rapid development of the vaccines to prevent covid-19 has to be considered a massive scientific success because creating such things usually take a long time. You would think that that was the biggest hurdle in combating the pandemic and that after that was achieved, the rest would be smooth sailing, with everyone getting vaccinated and the spread of the disease brought under control. And yet getting enough people get the vaccine to achieve herd immunity is turning out to be the hardest part, a situation that I would not have thought possible when the outbreak was causing panic back in the first half of 2020.

And yet that is where we are.
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The problem with streaming

When I wrote about the funny TV show Ted Lasso, some readers expressed regret that they do not subscribe to Apple TV+, the only. place where you can see it. This raises a problem that I think is going to get more acute with time, and that is that we may be entering a world where certain films and TV shows will be inaccessible to some segment of the population.

It used to be simpler, at least when it came to films. Films were released in theaters and if you missed it on its first run, you waited until it was released in some video form that you could rent it fairly cheaply from your neighborhood video store or borrow from your public library. You were guaranteed some form of easy access to all films. But now film makers and distributors have another option and that is to create their own subscription streaming service to show their own shows. So now in addition to Apple TV+, we have Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+ and many more. This website tells you where you can find a particular film or TV show to stream.
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A funny TV series about soccer

On the lighter side, the funny Apple TV+ comedy series Ted Lasso features Jason Sudeikis as a US college football coach, hired by the owner of a lower division English football team to coach a demoralized and dysfunctional team desperately trying to avoid being relegated to an even lower division. The owner Rebecca had acquired the team from her husband Rupert after a bitter divorce. Why she hired an American who has no knowledge of soccer and why he accepted the offer so that he is hated by the team’s loyal fans are plot points that are not really that much of spoilers but I will not reveal them here.
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Film review: I Care A Lot (2021) and guardianship abuse

There are many elderly people in the US who live alone but are not poor. This Netflix film is a dark comedy of the way that some people abuse the guardianship laws in the US to exploit such elderly people out of their life savings. The way it works is that if a doctor certifies that someone is incapable of looking after themselves, a court can declare them to be ‘wards of the court’ and appoint a guardian to look after them and the guardian immediately gains total power over that person’s life, including their finances. The judge gets to decide whether you need a guardian and who gets to be your guardian and everything hinges on that decision. Usually it is a member of the family who petitions the court but it is not necessary and it is not always the case that they are acting in the best interests of the person. Unscrupulous guardians can sell off the ward’s assets to pay for their care and pay themselves a hefty fee and there is little that can be done about it once the process is set in motion.
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The story behind Midnight Cowboy

This 1969 film tells the tale of the unlikely friendship that arose between a fresh-faced country boy (Jon Voight) who comes to New York City with the hope of making money as a cowboy gigolo and a lowlife street-wise hustler (Dustin Hoffman) who knows (or acts like he knows) all the angles. I remember most vividly the bleak scenes of the two trying to survive the brutal cold of winter in a decrepit, grimy apartment in a city that looked gritty, dirty, decaying, and crime ridden, the wonderful theme song Everybody’s Talkin’ by Harry Nilsson, and the haunting background harmonica music played by the great ‘Toots’ Thielemans (who incidentally also played the Sesame Street theme during the end credits of that show.)
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Too many flashbacks? Trying too hard for surprise endings?

I recently watched two TV series that used the flashback technique extensively in their narrative structure. The use of flashbacks in telling a story goes back a long way in the written form and there are good reasons for its use.

The flashback technique is as old as Western literature. In the Odyssey, most of the adventures that befell Odysseus on his journey home from Troy are told in flashback by Odysseus when he is at the court of the Phaeacians.

The use of flashback enables the author to start the story from a point of high interest and to avoid the monotony of chronological exposition. It also keeps the story in the objective, dramatic present.

Its use in films is necessarily more recent, as this Wikipedia article describes.
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The Muppets ranked and Rita Moreno

People have strong feelings about which Muppet is the best. I am one of them. The people at Pop Culture Happy Hour asked their listeners to vote for their favorite and they got more than 18,000 responses with over 150 Muppets receiving votes. Some extremely tough questions had to be addressed, such as what Muppets qualified. (The answer: “Any Muppet from any property or era was eligible, including The Muppet Show, Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street, Labyrinth, etc.”) Then before tabulating the results, there were other issues such as should Statler and Waldorf, Bert and Ernie, or Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker be considered as individuals or as pairs. Only Statler and Waldorf were considered as a pair, which I agree with.
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TV review: Behind Her Eyes (2021) (WARNING: SPOILERS GALORE!)

Normally I am careful to avoid spoilers but I just finished watching this show and was incensed by it but could not give my reasons for hating it without exposing the plot.

This highly promoted Netflix six-part series starts interestingly enough. It features Louise, a part-time secretary in a firm of psychiatrists that has just hired David who has a beautiful wife Adele. Adele’s parents were very wealthy but died in a fire in their mansion while she was asleep but David managed to rescue her. She ended up in some kind of residential clinic for therapy and while there becomes good friends with a goofy working class gay drug addict named Rob and the two of them learn how to have lucid dreams, where one learns how to control one’s dreams.

It is now ten years later and it soon becomes clear that David and Adele’s marriage is in trouble, that he detests her while she keeps telling him how much she loves him. There is clearly some dark secret in their past and one knows that the plot is heading towards some big reveal. Meanwhile, David and Louise start a clandestine affair while Adele and Louise meet on the street and become friends but Adele asks Louise not to tell David that they are hanging out together, and Louise agrees. Why Adele asks this and Louise agrees is not clear. But ok, one can overlook that particular plot hole for the sake of advancing the narrative.

The first four episodes is your standard psychological thriller in which one character, in this case Adele, becomes increasingly creepy, seeming to have the ability to know what other people are doing even when she is not there. It was a little slow for my taste but not too bad and I was looking forward to the pace picking up in the last two episodes as the denouement approaches, when all is revealed that explains David and Adele’s weird relationship.

But then in episode five the plot goes bonkers and the final episode six is really nuts.

Now is where the spoilers begin.
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