'enery the eighth I am I am

Every now and then I upgrade my website, jimmenick.com. I don’t exactly change the design—life is short—but I do have at the content. Some of it is evergreen and stays as is, but some of it needs a kick in the pants because things ain’t what they used to be, e.g., handouts on how to judge PF, which regularly need to be reevaluated. Other things get weeded out altogether; I’m thinking that by now most of what I wrote during the Harding Administration about LD can go down the old drain. I’ve only just begun working on this, but it will hold me for a while, especially the Tournament Toolkit, which will need the most work. Anyhow, this morning I discovered that access to a few of the original Nostrum episodes was missing. Sacre effing bleu, as the Frenchies say. I fixed that, not only for the sake of the website but to get for myself a definitive set. After all, I do think of it as the Moby-Dick of forensics (by which I do not mean ponderously long and no one ever really reads it, but then again, I’m an M-D fan since college, when I hired out to write papers on it for hapless fraternity bros who had more money than brains, and I became even a bigger fan when I read it, about ten years after that). I couldn’t find the overall file for the first collection, the one that I used to upload it to Amazon. Sigh. It must be on one of the old computers that I scrapped last year. I do hold out some hope it’s on one of the numerous external drives on the table next to me that I have to do something with someday. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I finished reading Wolf Hall yesterday. Literally reading, as compared to an audiobook (which I do consider reading, but I would imagine that Wolf, which is lots of little strings in all directions, wouldn’t work well by ear). I was inspired by, first, having watched the TV version (which I loved), and then seeing that the third volume had just hit the stands. The time seemed ripe. I probably confused the issue by starting to watch The Tudors at the same time. The show is enjoyable enough, but as The New Yorker put it, it is pretty much cast with underwear models. To wit, Holbein’s Henry:

Played, in The Tudors, by Jonathan Rhys Meyers:

Um, pumpkins and oranges, you might say. Anyhow, I really loved the book, which has inspired me to find out what the facts are, since they differ widely between Wolf and Tudors. For instance, the bastard Richmond melodramatically dies as a lad in the latter (not true), and is alive and kicking still at the end of the former (true). The real problem is that TV imprints things on the brain more sturdily than books, especially wispy books with circular narratives like Wolf. Also, one has to account for the fact that Wolf’s Anne Boleyn was The Crown’s first ER, while Queen Anne of The Favourite is The Crown’s second ER. Which is not to mention that Dr. Who was the first Crown’s Prince Consort, Dr. Who’s Clara is Victoria in that series (which I’m also watching), and Broadchurch, which I am also watching, fields not only two Whos but also Anne/Elizabeth, Rory and, for all I know, Strax and a couple of Daleks. Can’t these British actors find one job and stick to it?

The bottom line is, Wolf Hall, the book, highly recommended. Ditto WH the Masterpiece Theatre (or whatever it was). The Tudors? Think of it as the Shonda Rhimes version of the 16^th Century: entertaining, lots of lust, to be taken with a full cone of salt.