I seem to have lost my trial of Amazon Prime. I need to check for the best deal I can find on it but for now I am back to just Netflix. Have you ever seen or can you get Spartacus the series? It's of course about Spartacus, his capture and training to be a gladiator, and his eventual escape leading a slave revolt and waging war against the Romans. I liked that show and might watch it again. There is a Belgian show called Unit 42, a cop show. It might be worth a look. There is a one season show called Troy: Fall of a City that tells that story in 8 episodes. I put it on my list. There is a detective show called The Sinner which has two seasons. There is a movie called The King's Speech I thought was good. Have you seen it? Once Upon a Time in America is currently on Netflix here. I am going to watch it again. Yes, it's a great movie.

On Amazon Prime over here some shows are included with it (a monthly fee is payable) same as Netflix. I hope you got to watch a complete series of Fortitude. !! I have watched Spartacus. Apparently all that stuff about him being crucified was wrong - his body was never found. Unit 42 seems familiar - I may have watched one episode - I will check. I have seen The Sinner - I was not that keen on it. I haven't seen "The King's Speech" apparently there were a lot of historical inaccuracies in it - he was a nice fellow it seems but as thick as a brick. I haven't seen "Once upon a time in America" for a long while - it is a classic movie though - I really enjoyed it. I am going to watch Ep 2 of Falling Water - just to give it a chance to develop. The girl in it was in "Versailles" have you seen that? I really enjoyed it - there were about three seasons of it. I have just checked Unit 42 and for some reason I watched about ten minutes of it - we can have a go at that if you fancy it - if it turns out boring we can always try something else (she said optimistically !!)

I saw the first season of Versailles when it came out. I will have to finish it when I can. My sister and I watched The King's Speech cause she liked the actor and thought he did a great job. I'm watching Once Upon a Time right now. I have to run a couple of errands later. It's a hot day today. Better to be inside.

We are just emerging from a heatwave - I hope it doesn't come back !! Once upon a time is a longgg movie!! Well worth it though. I think it was Colin Firth in the King's Speech wasn't it? He is a good actor - he was the best Darcy I think in Pride and Prejudice - also he was good in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Be cool !!

Back on Netflix I am watching a Brazilian show dubbed in English called The Mechanism. It's based on a true story, but dramatized naturally. It deals with the financial crimes unit of the Federal Police. It started off really slow, and it never gets very fast. haha. But I got interested in the story. All the construction companies in Brazil were involved in bribing politicians and getting contracts. It went up to the President and all political parties were involved.

You asked about Epstein. I just saw a newspaper piece quoting someone who has spent 7 months in the same detention center where Epstein died, and he said it was impossible for him to hang himself there. The sheets are made of paper and won't hold your weight. There is nothing in the cell from which to form a weapon to kill yourself. There is no way to attach a sheet or anything to the ceiling or anywhere. The bed frame is bolted down and cannot be moved. https://nypost.com/2019/08/10/former-mcc-inmate-theres-no-way-jeffrey-epstein-killed-himself/ So it looks like a deep state operation. The powerful people with a lot to lose figured he would talk to keep from spending his life behind bars and they shut him up.

It's cooler today. In a couple of weeks we will be past the worst. September brings nice weather in North Carolina.

Epsteins hyoid bone was broken in three places - this hardly ever happens in a hanging - nearly always in strangulation. The guards falsified their records. I think it is almost certain that he was murdered. He was not the type of man to kill himself - he was basically a psychopath and they are not known for committing suicide. I think he was determined that he would not go down alone - and he paid the price. Update - NBC also reported that Epstein's body has been claimed by an anonymous "associate". As far as entertainment goes - I am not really watching anything regularly at the moment - I will probably return to Falling Water if nothing else turns up. I like Autumn too - not too hot - not too cold yet - beautiful golds and reds and oranges mixed with brown and green - a beautiful season.

Given that there was no place on the ceiling to attach a sheet, or rope, or other implement, and that the ceiling is not high enough to allow for a long drop, it is difficult to conceive of Epstein hanging himself, or of the hyoid bone being broken during a hanging.

The Mechanism is more interesting than it seemed at first. But it seems even Brazilian TV isn't immune from the PC plague. In the second season it turns out one of the detectives is gay. He goes to help a straight friend capture a fugitive and gets shot and killed during the mission. But I will say this for the way they handled it, there was no kissing, simulated sex, or hugging, etc. They didn't throw it in my face. I appreciate that.

According to the autopsy report he tied a sheet to the bed and leaned towards the door. It's looks set to be another fudgefest just like the Kennedy assassination. They will let people surmise all different kinds of theories until the Chinese whispers get more and more inaccurate and blur the truth beyond recognition. For me it is simple and obvious - he was taken out to stop him taking anybody with him. I can't say I am sorry that he is dead - he probably deserved it - but that is a very slippery slope to go down.

update - I am on Episode 8 of "Better Than Us" on Netflix at the moment. It is Russian - set in the near future where robots are in operation doing jobs that humans could do - and there are a group of people who want to destroy them. The company CRONOS have developed a super-bot (sexy female of course) who can sense human emotions. She ends up with a family in crisis and the story takes in the family history and current difficulties. There is a cop who wants to take down the head of Cronos. It is OK - it jogs along - nothing outstanding but entertaining enough.

Sounds interesting. I've seen a few robot movies and some of them I liked a lot, others not as much. I checked Netflix and it is on here now as well, so I will watch it next.

I am finishing the second season of Mind Hunter, a series about the development of the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI. Some young agent named Holden Ford got the idea of interviewing people who murdered multiple people over time, to try to find out everything he could about them and their motivations and methods and so on. At first the idea wasn't given much credence, but he was given the green light to conduct an interview with Edmund Kemper. That was the start of things. He and his partner sought the advice of a clinical psychologist who eventually joined the team as a civilian consultant. And that was the small group who began to interview what they termed "serial killers", a new term, and develop information to allow them to create profiles of killers. The second season just came out, and I read that a third season is in the works. I can see this series continuing for some time if they want. It seems most of the second season will deal with the Atlanta child murders (Wayne Williams was eventually arrested for them) and the BTK killer.

As far as PC stuff goes, there is a little bit of it. The psychologist is portrayed as a lesbian in the first season, but they don't show any sex or smooching. In the second season she meets a bartender and they hook up, but the way they show it wasn't some in your face thing. She has to hide her orientation from those she works with since, although the DSM had already changed the diagnosis of same sex sex from a deviance to an orientation disturbance, it was still looked upon as a mental illness and a crime in many places. I don't know if she will come out later, though I imagine that since they have shown this much of her private life and relationship with the bartender that at some point the FBI will find out and that issue will be included in the story. But so far anyway, her lesbianism doesn't dominate the story, it takes up very little time. The show is about profiling serial killers and the story of the BSU's creation and successes.
You might like this one.

I will have a look at it when I get to the last episode of season one of Better than us. It kind of slows down a bit in the middle and there is an aura of teens saving the world in it - but it's not so pc as most shows. I think Russia as a whole is not a very pc country.

For whatever faults he has, I like Putin for standing up against the deep state. I think Russia has been targeted because of this, because they have resisted joining the cartel of international banks owned by the deep state group. I think you are right about Russia. Putin has taken a very non-PC stance regarding the Christian Church, the Russian churches that is. It isn't very communist at all, but Putin has promoted the church in Russia. I think he has done this as a way of combating the leftist or liberal social engineering being promoted worldwide. He claims that he doesn't persecute gay people, but he said the State cannot promote homosexuality as normal, something like that. The liberal media didn't like it, but Putin doesn't seem to give a crap about that. I respect him for that. I know he may have interests which are not aligned with our countries, of course. But I think much of the stuff we read in the media about Russia is manufactured stuff to portray Russia as a huge threat to the West. Russia isn't big enough to threaten us in a real sense, not like China. China is the real threat to the West militarily, and they are an increasingly larger and larger economic threat to us. Trump is using our advantage in trade to pressure China. They sell 10 times as much stuff to the US as we sell to them. But they don't give us good deals. They steal technology. They hacked the names and info on just about everyone who works for the government back in 2014. There are other ways they take advantage of us. (The Clintons took campaign contributions from the Chinese, which is illegal, in exchange for, God knows what all they gave them. The Clintons and Obama would sell out the US for personal profit whenever they could get away with it. I only hope they will some day be brought down with incontrovertible proof which is tied directly to them, which they cannot claim was done by subordinates, who suddenly commit suicide shortly thereafter.)

Anyway, I like that Russia is not so PC.

How the Clintons get away with what they do is beyond me - they must belong to a very effective power elite - much like our own royal family. It has just come out that Lord Mountbatten was involved in talks to initiate a coup against Harold Wilson (Labour Prime Minister in the sixties) he had aspirations to become Prime Minister. This is not surprising for the man who put his nephew Prince Philip (18) in the social circle of the future Queen Elizabeth (13) and demanded that she change her name to Mountbatten when they married - she refused. He couldn't control the promiscuity of his wife Edwina who was having an affair with Nehru when Mountbatten was Viceroy of India. He is Charles favourite uncle and allowed Charles and Camilla to meet there when Charles was married to Diana. They are a hateful horrible bunch except for the Queen. - I have started watching Mind Hunters for a bit of a break from Better than us. I can only binge watch a certain amount before my attention starts to wander!! It is the same kind of thing as Criminal Minds which I watched for a long time. It seems a favourite scenario to have these kind of units tucked away in cellars - X Files - Dept Q - Whitechapel etc. I was waiting for the empowered Lesbian to take charge and hey ho - pc rules ok. It is entertaining enough - but not really action packed as Criminal Minds tended to be. Change of tack - I was watching a documentary on James Cagney (always liked him) and it appears that in old Hollywood it was the custom to use live bullets in shooting scenes - Jimmy refused point blank to do this and said he would shoot the scene and they could edit the shooting parts into it - which they did - and a bullet ricocheted straight through the place he should have been standing !!! You couldn't make it up.

Even blank-shooting guns can be dangerous if you're too close to the expulsion of the gases from the muzzle. In one suicide I read about some man removed the slug from a cartridge and place the rifle barrel under his chin and shot himself, blowing the top of his head off. The investigators were stumped for a while, unable to find an exit hole in the ceiling. They have to try to track down the bullet. The guy apparently didn't want the bullet to possibly go up and come down on someone else. That happens sometimes in places where the idiots fire their guns up in the air for celebrations or just being wild, such as weddings and such in Arab cultures, and less often in other cultures. Once the bullet is overcome by gravity it falls back to Earth and reaches terminal velocity which is plenty fast enough to injure or kill someone, if they are so unlucky as to be hit. Those crazy Arabs and Afghans fire their AK-47 rifles on full automatic setting into the sky. Lots of them do it at the same time, increasing the odds that someone will be unlucky. Can you imagine your new spouse catching a bullet that way? Anyway, Cagney showed he was smart. I wouldn't trust those Hollywood nutjob actors with a live weapon.

Mind Hunter is slower than many shows but I like it, despite its drawbacks. Jonathan Groff the actor who plays 'Holden Ford', not the real name of the FBI agent who started the Behavioral Sciences Unit, plays a straight guy who breaks up with his girlfriend. I read somewhere else that he is gay. That person opined that this is why he couldn't pull off the straight scenes with his girlfriend. Or maybe they were supposed to play it as though there was no attraction between them. Also, he acts like a nerdy, snooty, bitch much of the time, introverted and in his own world, and failing to consider how his actions affect others. And, he does things no agent would do, like speaking to civilians about ongoing investigations in a couple of instances. You have to be tight lipped about ongoing investigations. Revealing details or strategies can screw things up big time, and may prevent investigators from catching the suspect, or from being able to convict him. He also often displays an air of self righteousness like that so common among the social justice crowd today. I suppose that could be one way the writers choose to create problems which must be overcome. Or is it the personality of the actor bleeding through into his performance? I like the actor who plays his partner, Tench. He seems normal and competent.

I listened to and watched a video of an interview of the real Ed Kemper from 1984. Much of the interview with Kemper in the show is taken verbatim from that interview. They found an actor who bears a fairly strong resemblance to Kemper. Though he is quite intelligent, of genius level apparently, Kemper was unfortunate in the mother he was born to. She belittled him continually, and as a young teenager she made him move into the basement, away from the family. "You'll never...." was something he heard quite a bit. His father left home. I read a summarized quote in which he claimed that going through war was nothing compared to living with her. Once Ed realized that he was murdering girls because of his frustrations and inadequate feelings derived from his relationship with his mother he decided he had to kill her, and he also killed her best friend. Then he called the police and turned himself in. He didn't want to kill any more girls. He seems like a decent sort of fellow, but he was badly damaged and unequipped to live in the world. It's too bad he wasn't raised by his father. He visited him for a month once and didn't want to leave because he was treated well.

Jonathan Groff is gay - he had an affair with Zachary Quinto apparently. Don't know about his co-star - I think perhaps he is also - only because there is no mention of a spouse or a girlfriend in the IMDB bio of him. I have seen him in loads of shows. I am not really homophobic - it is not their sexual orientation that offends me - it is their exhibitionism and lack of dignity. I cannot accept a gay man being a romantic hero to a woman - not because he is gay - but because it is fake and untruthful. I think the sex scenes of Groff with his girlfriend are merely that - sex scenes - I get no impression of true passion - of involvement - it's cold somehow. I don't find Groff to be a particularly good actor - his persona is too controlled - there is no openness in his eyes. It is truly tragic how Kemper was treated by his mother - and I can understand the inner rage and frustration he must have felt - if only one woman in your life loves you - it should be your mother. Some women are unbelievably evil - Myra Hindley and Rose West, Joanne Dennehy and in your neck of the woods Susan Smith. And sadly there are thousands more. It makes you wonder if Kemper had been raised by his father what his life would have been like.