The Xmas break, as it was, was decent enough, though I didn’t recharge as much as hoped. I certainly didn’t get my 2014 heavy music round-up finished like I planned, but I’m almost there.
The new speakers for my desktop are helping. I got these from Logitech, cheap but stylish and with a surprisingly rich low end, on a par with my old mini system. It even beefs up the tinny sound of my Steepletone turntable, which is a definite plus. But what it also means is that I can play stuff in the background while I’m doing other things and not have to deep-listen with headphones, which can get pretty exhausting when it comes to the dense and difficult music I like (it’s even worse with the stuff I don’t).
Aside from that, I finished a few books that I’d been dipping in and out of on my Kindle, and watched a lot of House on Netflix, starting from the beginning and working up to near the end of the third season so far.
I’ve seen loads of it before, up to season six at least; it’s great formula TV. And as such it tends to falter when it breaks that formula, such as the end of the first season and the start of the third when the show writes in antagonists for House, missing the point entirely: the disease of the week, the problem that House needs to solve, is the only antagonist necessary (and that’s especially so when the show’s main protagonist is an anti-hero to begin with). Season two works better than the others because it sticks to the formula, no bullshit.
In any case, it’s nice to see a faithful depiction of Sherlock Holmes (it gets the Holmes-Watson relationship right for starters), and I’ve noticed the wrestling references sprinkled throughout the third season. Five more left to go before we tackle the backlog of Elementary and Defiance on the DVR. Happy new year indeed.