Some of you may have heard of C# 6, the new version of the Microsoft .NET programming language, but what I am not certain about is that you know you can use it right now. I had expected that a new version of the language will be usable from the brand new upcoming fifth version of the .NET runtime, but actually no, you can use it right now in your projects, because the new features have been implemented in the compiler, in Visual Studio and, you have no idea how cool it is until you try, in ReSharper.
One might say: "Hell, I've seen these syntactic sugar thingies before, they are nothing but a layer over existing functionality. New version, my ass, I stick with what I know!", but you run the risk of doing as one of my junior developer colleagues did once, all red faced and angry, accusing me that I have replaced their code with question marks. I had used the null-coalescing operator to replace five line blocks like if (something == null) { ....
Let me give you some examples of these cool features, features that I have discovered not by assiduously learning them from Microsoft release documents, by but installing ReSharper - only the coolest software ever - who recommends me the changes in existing code. Let's see what it does.
Example 1: properties with getters and no setters
Classic example:
publicint Count { get { return _innerList.Count; } }
Same thing using C# 6 features?
publicint Count => _innerList.Count;
Cool or what?
Example 2: null checking in a property chain
Classic example:
if (Granddaddy!=null) { if (Daddy!=null) { if (Child!=null) { return Grandaddy.Daddy.Child.SomeStupidProperty; } } }
publicint Number { get { return _number; } set { if (_number!=value) { _number=value; OnPropertyChanged("Number"); //with some custom code you could have used a better, but slower version: //OnPropertyChanged(()=>Number); } } }
C# 6 version?
publicint Number { get { return _number; } set { if (_number!=value) { _number=value; OnPropertyChanged(nameof(Number)); // this assumes that we have a base class with a method called OnPropertyChaged, but we can already to things inline: PropertyChanged?.Invoke(this,newnew PropertyChangedEventArgs(nameof(Number)) } } }
Example 4: overriding or implementing simple methods
I don't particularly like this, but it can simplify some code when used right. Classic example:
return degrees*Math.PI/180;
C# 6 way:
//somewhere above: usingstatic System.Math;
return degrees*PI/180;
There are other more complex features as well, like special index initializers for Dictionary objects, await in catch and finally blocks, Auto-property initializers and Primary Constructors for structs. You can use all these features in any .NET version 4 and above. All you need is the new Roslyn compiler.
There are a lot of people asking around what is the difference between BindingList<T> and ObservableCollection<T> and therefore, there are a lot of answers. I am writing this entry so that next time I look it up, I save StackOverflow some bandwidth. Also, because my blog is cooler :)
So, the first difference between BindingList and ObservableCollection is that BindingList implements cascading notifications of change. If any of the items in the list implements INotifyPropertyChanged, it will accept any change from those items and expose it as a list changed event, including the index of the item that initiated the change. ObservableCollection does not do that. So BindingList is better, right?
Wrong. BindingList is not "properly supported" by WPF, say some. Why is that? Well, because BindingList, as its MSDN page says, is just "an alternative to implementing the complete IBindingList interface". Yes, you've got it. BindingList is a lazy, thin, ineffective implementation of the interface. The Missing Docs blog has a very good explanation of this. Do keep in mind that BindingList was created during the time of Windows Forms and is being used by WPF only as an afterthought.
So let's use ObservableCollection then! No. The functionalities implemented by BindingList are far superior to that of ObservableCollection. Just thinking that you must somehow handle changes of every object in the list is killing the idea.
A subtle recommendation on the same MSDN page goes like this: "the typical solutions programmer will use a class that provides data binding functionality, such as BindingSource, instead of directly using BindingList". Well, what does that mean? It means using System.Windows.Forms.BindingSource, which does about everything, since it implements IBindingListView, IBindingList, IList, ICollection, IEnumerable, ITypedList, ICancelAddNew, ISupportInitializeNotification, ISupportInitialize, ICurrencyManagerProvider and is also a subclass of Component. A bit heavy, though, isn't it?
There is more. The BindingListCollectionView page says "Specifically, IBindingList is required for BindingListCollectionView, and IBindingListView is an optional interface that gives additional sorting and filtering support.", which indicates that IBindingListView is also useful when getting a collection view for your object.
To recap: the best solution seems to be an ObservableCollection<T> that also implements IBindingListView (which itself implements IBindingList). The implementation must be scalable (getting the index of an object that causes a change in an efficient manner), though and I wonder, if I am implementing IBindingList, why should I even bother with inheriting from ObservableCollection? The same StackOverflow user seems interested only in the INotifyCollectionChanged interface for the ObservableCollection which is also implemented by IBindingListView!
Therefore, let's implement a class that explicitly implements IBindingListView and IList<T>, then publish the members we actually use! What could possibly go wrong? My idea is to store the index of an item next to the item, therefore removing the need to search for it. It seems that I must first implement an advanced List<T>, with a fast and efficient IndexOf method, then I can basically just copy paste the BindingList code and use this class of mine as the base. Unfortunately, BindingList uses Collection<T> as the base class, which itself implements IList<T>, IList, IReadOnlyList<T>. It seems I will have to implement all.
Immediately I have hit a snag. IBindingView is very difficult to implement, since it tries to filter using a string that is interpreted as a sort of DSL, so I would use a lot of reflection and weird conditions. Sorting is not much better. This is an interface invented when .NET did not support Predicates and lambda expressions, which would make sorting and filtering trivial and the subject of another post. So I go back to implementing a scalable BindingList, and just implement INotifyCollectionChanged over it.
For an implementation of IBindingView, check this out: BindingListView
Code time.
I've decided to implement the IndexOf caching as a dictionary with the objects as keys. The values are lists of integers representing all indexes of that value or object. Frankly I never realized that IndexOf for lists was not taking a start parameter, so it only returns the first occurrence of an item in the list.
There are three classes: AdvancedCollection is a fast IndexOf implementation of Collection. AdvancedBindingList is the copy pasted code of BindingList, with the base class changed from Collection to AdvancedCollection and with INotifyCollectionChanged implemented over it. SecurityUtils is only needed for the AddNew method of IBindingList and is again copy pasted from the Microsoft code. Enjoy!
Just a short revelation that I had. It starts with the definition of free speech, which is considered free if it does no harm. This is what is called the principle of harm. But what is increasingly happening all over the world is that more and more of what people do is considered harmful. Things like racism or misogyny have been now joined by online bullying, pro-life discussions, fat shaming, you name it. The result is a reduction of free speech.
If you want free speech, then brave the words of others. It is the penchant of humans and all life in general to categorize the world and then act in different ways based on discrete cases. It is not entirely correct, but it is how nervous systems work since worms were invented. It is a biological impossibility to be confronted with human behavior and not consider one category of people better than another based not only on color, but whatever you see differentiate them. And while I understand the need to push back with legislation against some biases that have become counterproductive, we have to eventually dial back even on those. Adding more exceptions to how thinking and feeling works just pushes people away and stifles the ability to speak freely.
An especially worrying trend puts copyright and commercial interests higher and higher on the list of things you should not cross. It is becoming so powerful a concept that it is increasingly used to stop people from expressing themselves. Online reviewers are being sued for not liking a product, people are being stopped from reading controversial material by buying the rights and then not publishing it and so on. But even small things that seem proper at first glance are just as toxic, like protecting children from all kinds of perceived threats. Forget they are children, just analyse the social cost of having them exposed to something; people learn from experience, there is always a balance between harm and evolution.
When will it end, you might ask yourself. Think of border cases like Snowden. Do you side with him, for disclosing information that affects all of us, literally, or do you side with the people that say he committed treason? Do you think encryption should be banned, so that governments can better take care of us by knowing everything there is to know about what we communicate? How about getting fined by the hotel you've just been to because you write a negative review. Are all these worth stopping people from calling you fat, gay, colored, old, stupid, or whatever you feel offends you most?
This book opened my eyes on multiple levels. First of all it went right through my Dunning–Kruger effect that made me hope that writing would be easy. Second, it showed me how to see the world as a writer, which is hugely valuable.
Writing Vivid Settings is also a value packed reference book. Rayne Hall doesn't go artificially raising your expectation level - you know the type: "in this book I will show you how to eliminate hunger and solve poverty, but before that...", he instead just goes right into it. In fact the transition to actual useful information was so abrupt that I found myself feeling grateful before I could even understand what the book was about. Then, when I did, it hit me even harder, because I understood not only what I was missing in my writing, but also what I was missing in my every day perception.
If I were to summarize the book, it is all about consciously describing from the point of view of your characters, in a way that makes the reader connect emotionally and subconsciously to the character and scene. In Hall's view there is no such thing as objective scenes, they are defined more than anything else by the character that observes them. The book advises to describe through the senses: smells, sounds, the lighting of the room, the way things feel to the touch, etc, then go towards what the character would most likely notice, based on their own personality and background, making sure to use similes so that the memory of the scene becomes anchored in the reader's mind in the same way it would in the mind of the observer in the book. Yes, it does sound weird, doesn't it? Make the reader feel as the person who doesn't really exist except in the writer's head.
Each chapter in the book explains elements on how to describe the surroundings, when to use them, how to use them, what to avoid, professional examples from other books and some assignments to make you get right to it. And there is where it becomes interesting. When I told my wife about it, she immediately recognized exercises for "grounding", something that is used in mindfulness and gestalt psychology. As an example: describe the smells in the room, then the way the light enters it and how it changes the colors, then some background sounds, all by using verbs that are very specific and indicative of the character's mood and similes that would be indicative of the character's background. I kind of mixed several chapters in this, so you can get the point. Well, when is the last time you ever did something like that in your life? When were you last conscious of the sounds and smells around you and what they evoke? When did you last compare the light in a place to a living thing, with a mind of its own, just because you can? It is all about bringing all those vague perceptions to a form that can be communicated, to others and to yourself.
That is the trick to good writing, for sure, but also a way of observing the world around you. Suddenly, I felt like a little child that doesn't see the world around because he doesn't know how. I found myself going places and trying to describe the scene as instructed in the book - many of the assignments in it suggest doing right that, anyway - and it was hard. It was more than hard, it felt impossible. Like living your life on a psychologist's bench, always asking you "what does that mean?" and "how does it make you feel?" and "what will that lead to?". But how alive the world seemed while doing that! Aware of my own senses, feelings and their roots, I could suddenly understand people who enjoy life for its own sake. The book's description is "Do you want your readers to feel like they're really there—in the place where the story happens?" After reading it, it seemed that I was never there in the first place.
It probably doesn't say things differently from other writing books, but it certainly opened my eyes. I also absolutely loved how it didn't start with marketing bullshit and got right into it, with theory, examples and exercises. It can be used as a reference, before and after writing, since it has exercises on improving already existing work. I think this is a great book.
I've decided to read some of the stuff that takes place in the Star Trek universe, for research purposes. I was particularly interested in Starfleet Academy and, since Next Generation was clearly the best Star Trek series yet, I went with that one. So here I am reviewing the first three in a fourteen book series called Star Trek The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy Book Series, all written by Peter David. And, boy, am I disappointed!
It's not that I expected some high end drama, but in reality each one of these books is a booklet that one can read in about 2 hours. All three of them together are barely a novel. And the thing is that this is exactly what I was looking for: a history of the crew of the Enterprise from when they were cadets. What am I disappointed for? It is a "written by numbers" book. It is one of those "write a novel in nine days" thing, only each is probably written in five. The characters are shallow, undeveloped, details are missing and there is no real science fiction in there. I mean the real stuff, the one that takes into account centuries of cultural and technological evolution in which we had eugenic wars and a third World War, in which we encountered a myriad of alien species that are very different from us. There is no social commentary, no psychological evolution, no high technology and no real personal drama. And I understand. Just take a look at the bibliography of Peter David, it needs its own page. The man is a writing monster. However, it is clearly a quantity vs quality thing.
Anyway, I will review all three books as a single story, which in fact it is. All about Worf at the Academy, Worf's First Adventure is about proving himself in a simulated battle against the Romulans, while Line of Fire and Survival are about him taking command of a diplomatic mission on a joint Federation-Klingon colony.
From the first pages we get that Worf has a conflicted personality, stuck somewhere between the strict tenets of the Klingon culture and the Human education from his parents, unclear if he is more Klingon or more Human. His parents are proud of him and his adoptive brother as they embark for the Starfleet Academy, but from then on, for three "books" of adventure, we don't hear anything about those parents anymore. In fact, the first book is there merely to prove Worf's superiority over his human brother who is forced to leave the Academy as soon as the story ends. Afterward, we don't read anything about him, either. There are more pages dedicated to grumpy and violent behavior than it is to what the Academy entails, what are the courses, or how disjointed lectures can form a cadet into an officer in a four year standard program. It is not explained why some are engineers and some are in security, even when they are taking the same classes. Nor is it made obvious how the teaching methods in the twentyfourth century differ from the ones in 1980. Worf simply floats from one sequence to the other, like in a dream, without the need for continuity or context or even common sense.
To summarize: Worf comes to the Academy, learns nothing new and his innate values and abilities help him go through the challenges posed by a Starfleet training. I mean, really, there is a part there about how Worf was taught to be in a certain way and not helping a team member when in need was simply not conceivable. So basically... he remains unchanged. True, Worf is one of the most stubborn and difficult to change characters in Star Trek, but still, a good story needs some sort of development, some sort of life changing challenge, any kind of challenge at all.
In truth, this level of writing makes me more confident on my prospects of writing books myself, but I don't want to read stuff like this.
I have always been bad mouthing the Sci-Fi Channel, later, after 17 years, renamed to SyFy, as if they wanted to distance themselves from the genre they were supposed to promote. Why? Because I was born in Romania, a place of rancid communism and cultural isolation. After the Revolution, Romanian television stations were scarce in showing SF, and when they did it was always if there was nothing "better" to show, like sports or stupid peasant comedy shows. I grew up with science fiction books and a thirst for sci-fi movies and series. All this time I was dreaming of these foreign channels that I've been hearing about. Amazing to think that there was a SciFi Channel out there, where they were showing sci-fi all day long!
Of course, the reality of it is that science fiction only recently started to pay off. While I was dreaming of a channel that was all Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, BSG, even Blake's 7, showing all new SF movies in the interim, the truth was less than stellar. They were showing crappy, mass produced, cheap programs that was all they could afford. Many of them were reality TV. I wasn't actually able to ever watch the SciFi Channel as a television station, anyway. But I have had contact with other similar ones and I was not impressed. So I judged them by their productions, stuff like Sharknado.
Lately though, I feel like I have to swallow my disdain, after they started doing really interesting stuff like Z Nation, which may be low budget, but well written: exactly what I have been waiting for from the Internet, but failed to materialize. Since writing should be the smallest effort in a show, I expected it to far outweigh production values, but until now, I have rarely seen stuff like that. After loving Z-Nation, now they started with a TV adaptation of The Expanse book series and it is amazing!
A well thought out universe in the near future, where the Solar System has been colonized and the three political entities are Earth, the Asteroid Belt and Mars, locked in an awkward standoff of military and economical influences. The show has really good effects and its attention to details, no doubt coming from the book, but well translated to TV, is great! The African ethnic influences on the Belter culture, the East-Asian preponderance in Earth leadership and the weird mixes of cultures all over, are really cool, but what I appreciate to no end is the realism of the space technology. There is a little inadvertence between script and reality, of course, but most of the stuff in the first 4 episodes is really believable (meaning it is achievable within the science and resources that we know today). The characters are deep and interesting, their interactions weaving together and apart in a very well coordinated dance.
But what I like about The Expanse more than all the production values, great writing and complex characterization is that it is a courageous enterprise. While I was watching it with my wife she was constantly pestering me with questions about stuff that she didn't understand. This, for once, is not a lowest denominator kind of show, it is hard sci-fi for hardcore sci-fi fans! And well done enough so that even on and off fans like my wife would be able to appreciate!
To summarize: watch The Expanse. I have high hopes for it!
We are three in the room, all dressed casually, but I know them for what they are: angels. And they are here to kill me. I fire bullet after bullet, but they hit in weird places in the room, as if I am not even aiming straight. I spit at the first one, defiance my only weapon. The spit ball goes sideways, at a 60 degree angle from my target. Illusion! I aim the gun 60 degrees in the other direction and fire three bullets. The angel falls down.
My gun is pulled from my hand by invisible forces and the second assassin is upon me. He tries to kill me, but he can't. I've taken precautions. Pig meat during this holy day makes me unclean and angels can only kill pure creatures. The angel snarls "You thought pork would save you?" A ball of pure light grows from his open right hand. Unfortunately for me, angels can also purify one by touch alone. I am powerless in his hands. I know I am going to die. As the energy touches my temple I feel the excruciatingly painful ecstasy of purification. In that fraction of a blink of an eye, I feel I can be anybody, do anything. I choose to have telekinesis and get my gun back. I shoot the angel full of holes.
"Who the hell are you?", the dying angel murmurs. "I am Jesus of Nazareth", I reply. He scoffs "That place doesn't even exist!". "Not yet", I grin as he breathes his last.
This book itself was written in two days and it shows. Fortunately for Steve Windsor, the author, it is also a damn useful book, concise and mostly to the point. Full disclosure: I've decided to study writing and hopefully write a novel. This is the first book I have read about the subject.
Meant as a reference, Nine Day Novel: Writing Fiction: How to Use Story Structure and Write Your Fiction Novel Faster is going for covering structure and speed, identifying a commonly used template for fiction and applying it for creating the structure of the book. Windsor then prepares the future author for a nine day schedule in which to write a 100000 word novel - which is at the lower end spectrum of what is considered one, but still technically a novel - even indicating ways to gain the time without making huge changes to your way of life. You know, stuff like not watching TV series (damn you, Steve!!).
He names the template 4PSS (four part story structure) which looks kind of like this:
SETUP
Opening scenes
Killer Hook Event
Establish setting, scene (location), stakes of hero
Foreshadow coming events
Set up the inciting incident
First plot point - inciting incident
REACTION – retreat, regroup, run
Reaction to first plot point
First pinch point - allude to evil force – Physical middle of Part 2
Reaction to pinch point
Lead up to midpoint
Midpoint of the story
Revelation - figure out what you are up against – Physical middle of your Novel
PROACTION - Doomed attempt to take action
Reaction to midpoint
Second pinch point - allude to evil force again
Reaction to second pinch point
Pre second plot point lull - give the reader a tidbit of info – take a breath
Lead up to second plot point
Second plot point - the world changes again
Start the Ticking Clock
RESOLUTION
Hero accepts reality of the situation
Climax battle scene
Final Resolution
New equilibrium/cliffhanger if writing a series
Actually, it looks exactly like this. I've downloaded it from his web site. He even goes the extra mile to create a story with us and point out famous books that used this structure.
Bottom line: as a reference, it is a great little thing. It is actually part of a Nine Day Novel series that covers outlining, writing, self editing, self publishing, etc. It's too bad he plugs the Scrivener book writing software tool, which only seems to work on Mac. I've tried installing the Windows version and it is a crappy Java bull that never went past the start of the installer. That may indicate that the book is slightly dated, but it's not, it has been published in January 2015, at least on Amazon.
It pays to see how celebrities got to where they are. It is a continuous chain of events that feeds off their talent (or lack thereof). Just like with Angelina, here is a video with Bjork, age 11, reading a nativity story in her native language.
This is the fourth part of the 2015 autumn TV series pilot review. See parts 1,2 and 3 before this one.
The Frankenstein Chronicles is a terrible title. Inspector John Marlott investigates a series of crimes in 19th Century London, which may have been committed by a scientist intent on re-animating the dead. Sounds like a mix between Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein. Interesting enough it stars Sean Bean, who is also the lead in Legends. Does that mean Legends is on its way to cancellation? Anyway, Bean seems determined to not die in movies anymore!
The beginning is quite well done, with Sean Bean being some sort of police officer in a London plagued by crime and corruption. He finds a corpse, apparently made of pieces of several other bodies, and then he is tasked to find the responsible, not out of civic duty, but because it clashes with a planned legislation against unlicenced medical professionals. Quite gritty and quite interesting set up. If the rest of the pilot is as good, I guess this will remain in the list of shows to watch.
Unfortunately, the show is not as good as I would have liked. It tries to shove all too many clichés down your throat, while being slow in pace and low in entertainment. I will keep watching it, like I do Jekyll and Hyde, but I think they both will not be worth watching.
The Last Kingdom. The year is 872, and many of the separate kingdoms of what we now know as England have fallen to the invading Danes, leaving the great kingdom of Wessex standing alone and defiant under the command of King Alfred. Against this turbulent backdrop lives our hero, Uhtred. Born the son of a Saxon nobleman, he is captured by the Danes and raised as one of their own. It sounds like an attempt to follow on the success of Vikings, which I have to say has more to do with casting and music than the story. Anyway, time to watch.
The pilot starts with Vikings attacking Northumbria and killing everybody due to their superior training and tactics. They take away a boy and a girl to serve them, the boy being the lord's son. Soon he will become the Dane's earl adopted, but that will change when he is a man. That is his story. Damn it, I wish I had reasons not to watch it, but... I find none. This one stays.
Two to go: The Romeo SectionLies, corruption, murder - welcome to the world of The Romeo Section where spies are recruited to seduce for secrets. I hope it is not another government agency that solves crime thing. The description leads to some pretty dark thoughts in my head, but it might just as well be beautiful people acting all sexy the entire thing. James Bond without the action or the brain, that sort of thing. Personally I expect people who get recruited as spies in order to seduce secrets away to be soulless sociopaths or tortured souls looking for redemption... or both. Let's see which one is it.
The episode starts with an exotic location: Hong Kong, a well aged gentleman at the horse races and people watching him or giving him "subtle" hints in conversations. Funky jazzy music (almost like a heist movie one - oh no!). 15 minutes and nothing happened other than posturing and fancy musical themes. 10 minutes later some sex scenes in which not even boobs are being shown. That's really brave... More and more talking, posturing, meaningful looks. At the end of the pilot I wasn't interested in the section, the head of the section, the members, the cute girls they are banging without showing their bodies or the fucking heist music that is telling me "wait, this is cool" without actually showing me anything cool.
Conclusion: no way! Dark enough for me to like it, but damn slow, badly acted, horrendously edited and plain dull.
Wicked City. A pair of LAPD detectives track down serial killers terrorizing the Sunset Strip. Cop show. I will watch 10 minutes and if I don't like it by then, it's a no.
The interesting thing is that it is set in 1982. The actors, I quite like: Jeremy Sisto as the cop and Ed Westwick as the first killer. Some more boobless sex... Police investigating, killer wiggling around, killer's girlfriend that may or may not be killed at any moment...
I actually watched two episodes on fast forward. I was still waiting for something to happen. It's better than most cop shows, I guess, but kind of slow and bringing nothing terribly new to the table. I will not watch it.
So, final list of autumn 2015 TV series pilots. Liked: Blood and Oil, Into the Badlands, London Spy, Jessica Jones, The Expanse, The Last Kingdom Undecided: Flesh and Bone, From Darkness, Heroes Reborn, Jekyll and Hyde, Limitless, The Frankenstein Chronicles Discarded: Agent X, Quantico, River, The Player, The Art of More, The Bastard Executioner, The Coroner, The Romeo Section, Wicked City Ignored: all the rest
The bigger a company gets, the stupider, it seems. I wanted to transfer the contacts from an old phone to a new one. Actually, since it was a phone - a smartphone, mind you - I thought it would be easy to just save everything to a file and import it to the other phone. Wrong! Every smartphone needs to be connected to some cloud account, otherwise it doesn't feel good. Let's enumerate the issues:
There are contacts on your SIM, but the SIM cards are too small to hold all the information of your contacts or all the extra info the phone associates with them - so no way to transfer to SIM, then just be on your merry way. This was the old way. In Windows 8 and higher, for example, the option to transfer to SIM has been removed completely
Each platform has it own cloud that, like clouds in the sky, are actually quite disconnected. Called it "corporate blindness", the symptoms being that you ignore that other companies even exist when you are working at one of these giants. You know, like when you are a character in a zombie movie and you see an undead walking towards you and you call it... a walker. Damn branding!
There is no way to delete all the contacts on your IPhone without a special software, and the software is not Apple.
There is no way to transfer contacts to a file from Windows 8. You can only transfer it to Outlook and then in a file
The day was saved by a very simple thing: a Nokia app that was installed by default on the phone called Transfer my Data. If you go to the app settings, it has the option to transfer all the contacts to a .vcf vCard file. All you have to do then is to email the .vcf file to your IPhone email account (I did it by first transferring it on my laptop via a USB cord and the standard Windows Explorer), open the email and click on the attached file. And voilà! Not only the contacts can be merged with existing contacts, but there is also the option to create entire new contacts (so overwrite and therefore delete old contacts).
Hope it helps someone who, like me, had to navigate through tens of unuseful and even deceitful corporate pages that try to force you to move your contacts to their cloud.
Just as in the previous part 1 and part 2, I am exploring the pilots for new TV series from autumn 2015. Some of the shows I haven't even heard about, some of them I flat out refused to try based on the genre or description, but some remained to be tried. Here we go.
The Art of More. The Art Of More exposes the crime and intrigue behind the glamorous facade of New York auction houses. Already sounds boring as hell and a tat pretentious (see what I did there?), but it stars Dennis Quaid, which is one of the actors I like, so let's see where that gets us.
The show starts with a museum, some American soldiers guarding it and some robbers that are trying to steal a valuable crown. We move to present day where the crown is auctioned for 1.2 million and one of the soldiers is now dressed in an expensive suit. This introduction kind of pulled me in, but after the series intro, the very first scenes threw me back out: fancy rap music, quick whooshing moves of the camera, like something from Entourage without it being funny. Then we get this cutthroat auction floor, with agents trying to charm and cheat their way into the pleasure of the money people. Quaid plays a very annoying and terribly rich person that everybody wants to woo. I feel a hook coming up. If it's nothing interesting I will give this up. I fear that it is a sort of Wall Street made serial, with the rich mentor and the resourceful youth.
I was right. The smartass young resourceful man that climbs the ladder, stepping on toes and heads. I am not going to watch it.
Next on is The Bastard Executioner. The Bastard Executioner tells the story of a warrior knight in King Edward I charge who is broken by the ravages of war and vows to lay down his sword. So a knight who decides what to do in medieval England? Like that is at all possible. Is it some attempt of rebooting Robin Hood without paying royalties?
It starts with one of the cheapest medieval battles I've seen so far, where a valiant knight (a poor man's version of Chris Hemsworth) is being grievously wounded then saved by a kid that looked like young Storm from X-Men. She asks him to fulfill his destiny and lay down his fighting sword. Later on, he is happily married with a pregnant beautiful girl while an ominous baron who fucks his wife then insults her, then gives orders while sitting on the shitter and while the Fool wipes his ass. Guess who is going to get killed and who will seek revenge? I can already see it.
Ah, Stephen Moyer is here, playing the baron's best man. To me it feels like this series is a little sssssuckie! Heh. Faith, prophecies, cardboard characters. This I will not watch.
The Coroner is next. A UK crime/drama that doesn't even have a description on IMDb. On Wikipedia we find a more detailed description: Jane Kennedy takes over the job of coroner in a South Devon coastal town she left as a teenager. Matt Bardock stars as Detective Sergeant Davey Higgins who was Kennedy's childhood sweetheart, and together they investigate local deaths. Oh, hell no!
This one I will gladly not watch.
The Expanse just started. The crew of the Rocinante discover a derelict vessel which holds a secret that may be devastating to human existence. Yeah! A new sci-fi! I just hope it's good.
I have to admit that this series might appeal to me more than to others, but I am going to tell you that I loved the pilot. It's about life and politics in the asteroid belt in the 23rd century. They took great lengths to make it realistic, as much as a TV show can do that with space physics and biology. There are several points of view: a relaxed officer on a cargo ship, a semi-dirty cop on Ceres, an Earth matriarch of a security company and a missing young heiress of a Luna based corporation. The ship interiors are too big, some space maneuvers are not quite accurate, but the post-colonization of the Solar System world is believable and the acting and production values are high.
Here is a nice video about the Dawn mission. It is hosted by the Planetary Society and very accessible for most levels of understanding of science and astronomy. Check it out, it is a fascinating mission.
Sarmale is a dish that is traditionally eaten around Christmas in Romania, although you can make them all year round and some Romanians do. This type of food probably has Turkish origins, since the word "sarmak" means "roll" in Turkish and "leh" is a common Turkish pluralization. Not that I know Turkish, but part of Romania was conquered by them, so some things remain. Sarmale is one of the good ones, but it is a time consuming dish to prepare so I never cooked it myself. That's what parents are for, right? However, recently when I was abroad, I found myself wanting to cook some for my foreign friends. Unfortunately I couldn't do it then, but the idea to cook some tasty sarmale remained.
Today me and the wife set off to do just that. She knows how to make them, unfortunately. That means that my giddiness was uncalled for, since I expected numerous improvements on the recipe, but instead I was coerced to follow "the law". Even worst, due to differences in taste and digestive systems as well as a lack of some more exotic ingredients, the recipe we agreed on is some of the simplest possible. No onion, no garlic, no paprika, no parsley in the mix, nor bacon or tomato sauce - only outside. However, I am sure that even so they will be extremely tasty and the simplicity of this recipe means even people that don't know how sarmale should taste like can do them at home and then experiment with their national ingredients.
Without further ado:
mix pork and veal chopped meat with some rice and pepper (and optionally thyme)
wrap mixture in pickled cabbage leaves to get the sarma rolls
put rolls in a large pot in the following fashion
first a layer of simple chopped pickled cabbage
a layer of sarmale, put one next to the other, but with some small space left, since they will grow
put a layer of chopped pickled cabbage and some bacon and a bit of smoked meat (like ribs), more thyme, maybe a little hot paprika
repeat the previous two steps until the pot is full
add water to fill the space
place in oven at 150C (300F) and cook for at least three hours
The time consuming part if the making of the rolls, which not only requires manual labor for each roll, but also needs good cabbage leaves, cut in the correct way. Plus the long cooking time. In Romania we eat them with polenta, sometimes with cream or yogurt, while biting from raw chilly peppers. Some prefer them hot, some like them cold. I especially like the cold ones, because you can just pick them up and eat them.
Now, the dish called sarma is done differently in each country. If you google "sarma" you get recipes from the former Yugoslavia (see this, as an example), but if you google "sarmale" you get the Romanian ones (Here is a decent one). The types of leaves used, the mixture, the cooking style may very drastically. I, for one, want bacon,onion and garlic in the dish. I would also add some tomato sauce and hot paprika in the mix on principle. I wanted to experiment with different types of meat, coriander, cumin, Indian spices and so on. There are also different types of leaves, but I would say that the pickling of the cabbage is one of the main reasons why the sarmale are so good. Perhaps other types of leaves could also be pickled, but that means I either have to do it myself or use the standard ones that you can find already pickled at the market. Perhaps one of the things that makes my mouth water the most is to add some mutton sausage mix in the meat, moving more towards the Arabic style of meat dishes, or just add sheep fat over the sarmale when they are cooking.
But why stop there? If you look at the various recipes, some of them start off by frying the garlic, onion and rice. Some of them add egg to hold the mixture, or celery, or parsley or other things. I know vegetarian people that don't put meat in the mix, or people like my wife who don't want fried onion in their food. There are fish cabbage rolls, there are chicken ones, some people use fine cut potato with or instead the rice. The leaves are usually either grape leaves or cabbage, although some don't use pickled leaves and any large leaf can be used (or even small ones if you are a clock maker with OCD). One example that I've heard about and doesn't appear in the Wikipedia article is using linden leaves. And the leaf type really really affects the taste. The grape leaf sarmale are eaten with yogurt, for example, while the cabbage one rarely so, but are eaten with hot paprika or chilly peppers. In other words, one can create any type of roll using any type of leaf with any type of content, as long as it absorbs the water and fat that carry the taste of the leaf and the other ingredients.
So, do you feel a little inspired by this or not? It is one of the most common Romanian slow cooking dishes and a delight to eat.