KD^3C^3 - 20250525 Some people stand in the darkness
Had a great time at the beach.
I managed to finish few books. Not as many as my goal, but sometimes just sitting and watching the waves. rash takes priority over speed reading through books.
And watching Baywatch. I watched at least one episode of Baywatch every day, on the free streaming app Pluto, and let me tel you, nobody from the 90s talks about how weird Baywatch is as a series. I grew never having seen any of the series, I just knew it from its promos of people in skimpy swimsuits running in slow motion, and the. punchlines about people running in slow motion There’s plenty of slow running to go around, but for a show about lifeguard it goes some very surprising places. It’s never what you expect, at literally anything seems like it could happen. Here’s a list of actual things that happened in episodes of Baywatch I watched this week, in no particular order.
A man who gets rescued by a lifeguard becomes obsessed with her, and stalked her waving every red flag along the way. She eventually quits, but it’s ok because she was only a guest star.
Jewel thieves bury a box full of jewels under a lifeguard stand.
A three-minute musical dream sequence where a homeless poet and a lifeguard dance together in formal closing on the beach.
A 2-person submarine sinks and the lifeguards have to scuba down to rescue them, but they don’t have enough oxygen in the sub, so one lifeguard hooks his own tanks up to the sub to save them.
Jason Momoa is a regular cast member, after the show moved to Hawaii.
A bunch of lifeguards in “rookie school” are caught using performance enhancing drugs.
Two lifeguards go son a romantic weekend at a hotel but get interrupted by another couple who is having too much sex.
Two lifeguards start a business selling sandwiches on the beach.
A tween develops a crush on Mitch (David Hasselhoff) which is only resolved by her witnessing Mitch’s son rescuing somebody.
A county music star enlists Baywatch to help find his child and wife who abandoned him on Venice beach 2 years ago. This is apparently a serve they offer and are successful.
Martina McBride shows up as one of the lifeguard’s best friend and aspiring country music singer. She gets multiple full music videos in to the episode.
Baywatch thwarts an illegal offshore casino.
Somehow the illegal offshore casino couldn’t just drive the boat a little further out into international waters.
A midair hang-gliding collision by two people trying to crash into the MTV Beach House.
The MTV Beach House has a televised competition with Baywatch to raise money for the Special Olympics
Mitch Apparently knows Jenny McCarthy and just calls her up out of the blue to set up the above competition and she agrees without question, re-structuring an entire television show to meet his desires.
Multiple jet-ski chases
A woman fakes her own death by shark attack, in the aptly named Shark Cove
The Beach Boys show up, because Mitch knows them too. They get multiple full performances on screen.
An earthquake.
A coal fire(?) interrupts a roommate dispute between three lifeguards but al of the action happens entirely off screen. We only see them leave and return after rescuing everybody.
Multiple episodes where Mitch (David Hasselhoff) shows up only to briefly explain why he won’t be in the rest of the episode.
A windsurfing class montage.
Baywatch is a wild show. 22 episodes per season, running for 11 seasons, They had to keep coming up with weird beach adjacent storylines. You never know what tone you’re going to get from scene to scene or episode to episode.
So with that, here’s the latest
HugoWatch
I finished Ministry of Time, and I think despite enjoying many of the individual moments, this novel didn’t quite click for me. Maybe it was trying to be too many things at once (spy thriller, romance, domestic comedy, and time travel story). The book spends a lot of time building up a big secret, and the reveal was underwhelming. Some of this is due to the protagonists’ limited POV in a world of spies and lies, but the payoff comes very suddenly and mostly ends with someone explaining everything that was going on. Just kind of a letdown.
Alien Clay, the first of Two Nominees by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a compelling read. Set on a penal colony on a barely inhabited world. There’s a mystery about life on the planet, as well as an uprising being planned by the prisoners, and those two things come together in a way that makes a lot of sense. The only problem for me was that I figured out how the two were going ti intersect about halfway through the book and so the back half felt like they were dragging out the mystery, even as it was well told.
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher was a pleasant surprise. A regency-adjacent drama all about trying to get married to the right people, but also one of the schemers is a secret sorcerer, who abuses her daughter (the protagonist) and does’t hesitate to use her powers to ill people. I generally enjoy reading works by T. Kingfisher (or her other pseudonyms) and this was no exception. I had a little trouble getting started as e are plopped right into the perspective of an abused 14-year old, and that was rough, but getting past t hat lead to a story about friendship and hope and why horses are evil.
Slo I still have a coupe novels to finis, I have started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s second novel in the finalists, Service Model, about a robot valet who is having difficulties after his human master dies. It’s all quite funny so far, in a bleak, Kafkaesque sort of way.
I managed to finish few books. Not as many as my goal, but sometimes just sitting and watching the waves. rash takes priority over speed reading through books.
And watching Baywatch. I watched at least one episode of Baywatch every day, on the free streaming app Pluto, and let me tel you, nobody from the 90s talks about how weird Baywatch is as a series. I grew never having seen any of the series, I just knew it from its promos of people in skimpy swimsuits running in slow motion, and the. punchlines about people running in slow motion There’s plenty of slow running to go around, but for a show about lifeguard it goes some very surprising places. It’s never what you expect, at literally anything seems like it could happen. Here’s a list of actual things that happened in episodes of Baywatch I watched this week, in no particular order.
A man who gets rescued by a lifeguard becomes obsessed with her, and stalked her waving every red flag along the way. She eventually quits, but it’s ok because she was only a guest star.
Jewel thieves bury a box full of jewels under a lifeguard stand.
A three-minute musical dream sequence where a homeless poet and a lifeguard dance together in formal closing on the beach.
A 2-person submarine sinks and the lifeguards have to scuba down to rescue them, but they don’t have enough oxygen in the sub, so one lifeguard hooks his own tanks up to the sub to save them.
Jason Momoa is a regular cast member, after the show moved to Hawaii.
A bunch of lifeguards in “rookie school” are caught using performance enhancing drugs.
Two lifeguards go son a romantic weekend at a hotel but get interrupted by another couple who is having too much sex.
Two lifeguards start a business selling sandwiches on the beach.
A tween develops a crush on Mitch (David Hasselhoff) which is only resolved by her witnessing Mitch’s son rescuing somebody.
A county music star enlists Baywatch to help find his child and wife who abandoned him on Venice beach 2 years ago. This is apparently a serve they offer and are successful.
Martina McBride shows up as one of the lifeguard’s best friend and aspiring country music singer. She gets multiple full music videos in to the episode.
Baywatch thwarts an illegal offshore casino.
Somehow the illegal offshore casino couldn’t just drive the boat a little further out into international waters.
A midair hang-gliding collision by two people trying to crash into the MTV Beach House.
The MTV Beach House has a televised competition with Baywatch to raise money for the Special Olympics
Mitch Apparently knows Jenny McCarthy and just calls her up out of the blue to set up the above competition and she agrees without question, re-structuring an entire television show to meet his desires.
Multiple jet-ski chases
A woman fakes her own death by shark attack, in the aptly named Shark Cove
The Beach Boys show up, because Mitch knows them too. They get multiple full performances on screen.
An earthquake.
A coal fire(?) interrupts a roommate dispute between three lifeguards but al of the action happens entirely off screen. We only see them leave and return after rescuing everybody.
Multiple episodes where Mitch (David Hasselhoff) shows up only to briefly explain why he won’t be in the rest of the episode.
A windsurfing class montage.
Baywatch is a wild show. 22 episodes per season, running for 11 seasons, They had to keep coming up with weird beach adjacent storylines. You never know what tone you’re going to get from scene to scene or episode to episode.
So with that, here’s the latest
HugoWatch
I finished Ministry of Time, and I think despite enjoying many of the individual moments, this novel didn’t quite click for me. Maybe it was trying to be too many things at once (spy thriller, romance, domestic comedy, and time travel story). The book spends a lot of time building up a big secret, and the reveal was underwhelming. Some of this is due to the protagonists’ limited POV in a world of spies and lies, but the payoff comes very suddenly and mostly ends with someone explaining everything that was going on. Just kind of a letdown.
Alien Clay, the first of Two Nominees by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a compelling read. Set on a penal colony on a barely inhabited world. There’s a mystery about life on the planet, as well as an uprising being planned by the prisoners, and those two things come together in a way that makes a lot of sense. The only problem for me was that I figured out how the two were going ti intersect about halfway through the book and so the back half felt like they were dragging out the mystery, even as it was well told.
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher was a pleasant surprise. A regency-adjacent drama all about trying to get married to the right people, but also one of the schemers is a secret sorcerer, who abuses her daughter (the protagonist) and does’t hesitate to use her powers to ill people. I generally enjoy reading works by T. Kingfisher (or her other pseudonyms) and this was no exception. I had a little trouble getting started as e are plopped right into the perspective of an abused 14-year old, and that was rough, but getting past t hat lead to a story about friendship and hope and why horses are evil.
Slo I still have a coupe novels to finis, I have started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s second novel in the finalists, Service Model, about a robot valet who is having difficulties after his human master dies. It’s all quite funny so far, in a bleak, Kafkaesque sort of way.