Totally Wired

Check out my obituary for Hunter S. Thompson, which appears here.

Meanwhile, for some time now I’ve quite fancied watching an episode of The Wire. It features a fair number of Oz and Homicide alumni in a Baltimore setting and is from HBO, which frees it from some of the constraints placed on US network TV. In the UK it shows on Fox 289, exclusive to those with a Sky digital box until recently. In neither transatlantic location do I have access to the show, until last Wednesday night, when episodes seven and eight strayed onto an old decoder box, part of the detritus that provides an infrastructure for my life as a viewer. Needless to say, it’s quite good. Nice to see J.D. Williams in action as Bodie, although these episodes are from 2002, so I’ll have wait another decade to catch up with the show properly.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I subscribe to Hoac, part of the H-Net humanities network. Recently it has turned into a sort of ersatz Cold War, with allegations of Stalinism and some timewarp Stalinist hackery on both sides. ‘Was Dalton Trumbo a scumbag' has been another theme to clog my inbox of late. (He spent a lot of time smoking in the bath, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, so today's health police would disapprove.) Maybe it’s time to split HOAC into an academic mailing list and a chat room for folks to chew each other out on: life’s too short.