Some of you may remember Southland, the (former) NBC drama that I wrote about several months ago. Its second season got canceled by NBC late last year after they’d already filmed half the episodes, in a truly stupendous WTF moment.

The show later got bought by cable network TNT, who agreed to re-air the first season and air the episodes of the second season that were already shot; no decision has yet been made on whether or not to produce new episodes… but hope springs eternal.

At the time, NBC’s explanation for canceling Southland was that the show was “too dark” and “too gritty” for prime-time network television. It was originally supposed to air at 10pm, but got briefly moved - at least in theory - up to 9pm because of The Great Jay Leno Debacle.

Not a lot of people believed NBC’s explanation that, once they’d seen the first two episodes of season two, they didn’t feel it fit well with the network at 9pm - everyone figured it was all down to Jay Leno.

The first two episodes of season two have now aired on TNT… and NBC’s original explanation is a bit more believable, now.
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A couple of geeky food-related things I’ve come across recently, that you might find interesting:

First, a fairly spiffy recipe for hayashi raisu, a Japanese beef stew that’s served with rice. I don’t cook much Japanese food, because finding the ingredients can be a challenge, and I’m annoyed by the cultural snobbishness that prevails on a lot of English-language Japanese food blogs…

I made it the other night, and it turned out pretty decent. I used demi-glace, which I’d never used before and had a hell of a time finding locally. I think next time I’ll just use strong stock, made from concentrate. I was skeptical about how it was going to turn out right up until I added the roux and everything thickened up into a, well, stew. Yay for roux once more…

Next up, a very interesting look at the science of cast-iron cookware. I have three cast-iron skillets; one is merely five or six years old, and kind of crap (like everything made by Lodge), but the other two are excellent - vintage Wagner and Griswold from who-knows-when, probably at least fifty years old.
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Way back in the day when 9600-baud modems roamed the earth, I used to hang out on local BBSes a lot. I met a lot of very interesting people that way, including the first two people I ever dated. I know, I know; meeting people online? Well, the rub, of course, was that BBSes were fundamentally local, and for all the paranoia about “bad people” “online”, the big BBS-user gatherings (”get togethers”) were pretty safe places to meet people in real life who you already knew fairly well over the computer.

I can only remember a few of the people I knew from back then - Chebutykin is one of them, and one I’ve actually spoken to within, you know, the last decade. Some of the others, I remember their names, and not much more…

There’s one person I recall surprisingly well, considering that we never met, and never exchanged more than a few messages back in, oh, 1992 or 1993 or something like that.
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As it’d be a bit hard to miss, if you’ve read the paper today or watched or listened to the news, a gentleman was killed last night after pulling a gun on two security officers at The Pentagon. The shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was a white American male.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not happy that Bedell wounded two guards and caused a great deal of mayhem and confusion. Nor am I happy about the people killed at Fort Hood recently. Or the people who died in Texas after Joe Stack plowed his plane into an IRS office there. Or the victims of the Holocaust Museum shooting, or any of the other incidents of late. I’m not one to celebrate pain and suffering, as a rule.

That said, a big part of me is happy, in a kind of abstract way, that these incidents have happened. And, in a way, a small part of me hopes that they continue to happen.
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I know it’s not a subject that’s of terribly high interest to everyone, but I figured I’d do a couple of paragraphs on properly fitting and fit-testing a respirator. This is not meant for people who are required to use one at work, but aimed at urban explorers, in particular - and anyone else who might have the desire to use respiratory protection in an avocation of their choosing.

The reason for this is simple - there has been a goodly amount of discussion in urban exploration circles on respirator (or gas mask) choice, and while this is a good thing, in that urban explorers are becoming more safety-conscious, nobody seems to be taking a particular interest in how to properly fit the damned things, thereby potentially negating the protection on offer.

So…
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