Will's Good Idea for Christmas Week

 A happy Christmas Eve to Stroock's Books readers wherever they (or he) is. We'll be heading up to our dad's this afternoon to watch football and then have dinner at the Croton Diner, a Stroock family haunt for decades. The Croton Diner makes several appearances in A Line Through the Desert. We'll spend Christmas at our sister's and then back home to New Jersey. 

Those bastards at NBC broadcast last night's Bills-Chargers game on their Peacock streaming service. One had to pay to watch the game. No thank you. We'll be damned if we're giving those SOBs $5.99 a month. We've got too many streaming services as it is. Mother!@#$. Of course this is the future of sports broadcasting. 

What Will's Watching: So we watched Whiplash last night instead. This is a music movie, a jazz movie.  Miles Teller is a talented and ambitious drummer, J.K. Simmons is a brilliant but sadistic musical school teacher and conductor. Whiplash has twists on the old music film formula, and we never quite knew where this film was headed. Teller was interesting and we rooted for him. We spent much of the film wanting to punch Simmons in the face. Both characters change over the course of the movie and achieve symmetry at the end. We don't care for Jazz, and we don't like Jazz's pretensions. Most of the drumming was indistinguishable from a toddler banging on an empty Quaker Oates box. Don't get us wrong, Jazz has its uses, if one is having trouble getting to sleep, for instance. Anyway, we enjoyed Whiplash, 3/4

Will's Good Idea for Christmas Week: We've still really no idea what we're doing in 2024 [or in general-Ed]. True enough. The World War 1990: Norway read through is going just fine. Alert reader(s) will see we've updated the Future Projects page. Our best guess is we'll spend January finishing up the in-progress War Night stories. At this very moment (8:28 AM, 12/2423) we think Thatcher's War should be the summer sneak in. We've really gotta find something else to work on. [Why?-Ed]. World War 1990 is our standard, our base. It's our mid, as the kids might say. [What about the Red Dawn Thingy?-Ed] Oh yeah....

On boxing day we'll begin our end of the year assessment and ruminations. [Greeeat-Ed]