Adventure stories turn me on, and I am reading one that is probably the hardest journey ever undertaken by man, the trip to the South Pole. Maybe I am wrong, perhaps the trip to the moon was just as hard. The idea of living in the cold for two years does not appeal to me at all. Not to be able to see the color green as in vegetation would be a living hell. Yet the men who undertook this journey lived in conditions totally unbearable to normal people. These were not normal people, they were extraordinary men.
Reading this account during the warm spring-summer months is recommended. When it is ninety outside and you are reading about living in minus fifty it has a cooling effect on the body. Sir Ernest Shackleton led this exploration in 1914. His trip was to be the first to cross the continent of Antarctica via the South pole. The sad story is that this first attempt failed, and it became an adventure to survive. I think I would rather live with COVID-19 than to take on such a trip as Shackleton did.
The book is over seven hundred pages long, and I have just crossed the four hundred page mark. I have finally reached a point where I can’t seem to put it down. Even as I write this, I am longing to finish so I can resume reading.
At my Tuesday Night At the Stray Bar Club via Zoom meeting one of the members suggested I watch a new series titled Billions. Since, I have watched two episodes and I am hooked on another story. I heard about this series months ago, but steered clear because the principal character is played by actor Damian Lewis who played Brody in Homeland. I truly believed I would continue to visualize this man as Brody in the new series. I didn’t want to ruin the image of Brody the marine who was captured and imprisoned by radical Islamist terrorists for eight years.
It didn’t happen, I didn’t see this new character as Brody. After ten minutes of the new story, I saw him as the totally new person playing the part of a billionaire hedge fund manager. The plot of this new story is wrapped in the mystery of how hedge fund managers avoid prosecution. The main conflict is between big money business and big power government. I’ll watch all the episodes and look forward to the next season too.
Watching a series is like watching a movie that doesn’t end. The story keeps developing throughout all the episodes and getting more and more complicated as it does. Usually, there is an end which wraps up the season, with a teaser to pull you in to the next season’s story. One benefit of modern TV is that when a season is over the entire set of episodes is available anytime you want twitch it. It is a very popular pastime to binge watch thirteen episode stories at one sitting (all day). I only hope the series called COVID-19 doesn’t mimic one of these tv series. I hate the idea of COVID being a story that doesn’t quit.
Filed under: Biography, family, Technology | Tagged: Billions, Binge Watching, Hedge Funds, Shackleton, South Pole, TV Series |
Ha ha! Almost like a teaser to end this post, “Does Covid-19 survive and torment humanity forever after? Or does the human spirit prevail? Watch this space next year?”