"Breaking Bad – Lingering Questions."

I'm linking to this because after writing that last post, I want to follow Boring as Heck. There, I added it to my blogroll. I don't know if I've ever done that based on reading only one post, but I can't read this "Breaking Bad" post. Not just yet. After bitching about and resisting nudging to watch the show, especially in the week leading up to the finale, I started watching one episode at a time.

I'd captured the first 20 or so episodes when AMC was running the whole series, in order, and I have a slight tendency to sit down at a certain point in the evening with the feeling that it's time to consume about an hour of television. I used to watch "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," but the political topics of the day — insurance and budgets — have a dreariness that is not puffed into an amusing form by derision and head-slapping. I know comedy should hurt. I like edge.

But it's such a dull edge, and perhaps some fictional explosions and existential ennui would better enliven my hour in the comfy chair. So I've been dipping into the accumulated episodes of "Breaking Bad." I've gotten far enough that I wish I hadn't switched off its recording after 22. There's not endless space in that DVR box, and we had about 100 post-season baseball games to keep track of before the World Series even begins, and then there are all those football games. Meade would watch these things live, and I wouldn't watch them at all, but put us together and the DVR is needed to control the flow of commercials, which I can't face with passivity. Some of them — I'm talking to you, "Jeremy" — bother me even in fast-forward.

So, with the nudging to watch it gone, I'm quietly, slowly consuming "Breaking Bad." I'll eventually reach then end, where "Lingering Questions" will be relevant to my slowly-catching-up experience. But I wanted to pin down that Boring as Heck post and thought it might matter to those of you who are beyond spoiler alerts.

"Thanksgiving Under Attack From Hanukkah."

The 2 holidays arrive on the same day this year.

God "has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! Even the atheists.... Everyone!"

So says Pope Francis.

"(T)his ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God...
And that, simply, is blasphemy."...

To both atheists and believers, he said that “if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good.”

ADDED:

The Colbert Report
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Time to read "The Great Gatsby"!

"Mark Sanford won over primary voters Tuesday night, but national Republicans aren’t celebrating..."

"... Many privately concede the former governor could hand a safe Republican seat to Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch."

Sanford is the former Governor of South Carolina, who resigned after disappearing and then reappearing as an adulterer with an Argentine girlfriend. That woman — Maria Belen Chapur — is now said to be his "fiancée," and she was at his side for his victory speech last night. I put "fiancée" in quotes because he's trying to get back in the public's good graces, so he should have actually married her by now.

Sanford will now face Elizabeth Colbert Busch and Green Party candidate Eugene Platt in a May special election. She is the sister of political satirist Stephen Colbert.