"I mean, Season 2 should be the easiest and best of anything..."

"... because usually when you write something, you do the best job and you cast it, and you try and find the people that are right for it. But then with Season 2, you know who you’re writing for, you bring in their physicality, you know what their strengths are, you know [who's] good at ad-libbing and who isn’t. You hit the ground running. That was the case with this but it didn’t apply so much, because I asked people it before I wrote it. I’ve been around for a while, so I was casting all the people I knew that were right for it. It’s always an easy shoot with my stuff because I’ve already lived with it for a year. I use the same crew. I use the same ensemble of actors or I find someone new that fit in. If someone handed me Mission: Impossible 8 and said we’re filming this next week, I’d panic, but with this show, it’s like with boxers: the hard bit is the training, the rest is easy."

Said Ricky Gervais, in an interview at Deadline, as the third season of his show "After Life" begins on Netflix. 

1. I wrote "[who's]" instead of "whose [sic]" because it's an interview. He was talking. It's no fun snarking at the transcriber.

2. "It’s like with boxers: the hard bit is the training, the rest is easy" — I have no idea if he's talking about the dogs or the humans with gloves, the men in shorts.

3. We watched the first episode of Season 3 last night. It's only about 25 minutes, but there's lots of detail, even though you can also get the sense that nothing happens and nothing can change, this is a random collection of bumbling, sad people. Obviously, that's why you shouldn't binge watch, shouldn't take the bait when Netflix starts its little timer down in the lower right corner, ready to fling you into the next episode. 

4. Resisting, we switched over to the 2010 Coen brothers movie "True Grit," which we'd paused halfway through the other day. We stuck with that to the end. I've never watched the John Wayne "True Grit," so I had no basis for comparison with the old film, whether Wayne shambled and mumbled better than Jeff Bridges. Nor can I compare the young actresses selected from obscurity to play the 14-year-old girl who somehow begins with true grit and teaches each man she encounters something about it. I wondered what happened to this actress in the next dozen years, and I was dismayed to run smack into "EXCLUSIVE: Pink-haired Hailee Steinfeld goes braless in a chainmail mini while posing in the shower before rocking a red wig and flashing her abs in latex in sizzling new shoot" (Daily Mail).

 

5. RICKY: "I’m fascinated with ego and narcissism and vanity and fame. The last 10 years we’ve seen the rise of the narcissism; I think all the bad things in the world are about narcissists, usually men, wanting to rule the world. Now we’ve got Instagram where it’s people standing next to a boat with their shirt off. It’s not even their boat, sometimes it’s not their abs. You see it mostly in entertainment, acting and modeling and so on. But what is the worst job to be a narcissist? When you should be listening to someone else. I thought I’d make [the therapist character] a narcissist, mixed in with toxic masculinity. I remember telling Paul Kaye about all the lines and I said, 'Do it like a football hooligan who works in the city.'"

6. If you read that whole interview, you'll see something that might make you think that sounds like something Althouse said about aging the day after her birthday — here. So you should know that I was influenced by re-listening to an old Ricky Gervais podcast where he made that point — that as you age each day is a larger percentage of the number of days you have left to live. He's repeating himself in this interview, but I offered an observation without saying I heard something like that in his podcast somewhere, that has no transcript to search. I do prefer to link!

"And I should have told him, 'No, you're not old.'/And I should have let him go on, smiling, babywide."

 

"Lather" came up in the "Rock Mix" that Spotify made especially for me today, as I was smiling — babywide? — on my morning run today, the day after my birthday, my 71st birthday, or as I like to put it, the first day of my 72nd year.

Lather's friends in the song — who've "stopped being boys" — are 33 and 27. I mean one (the banker) is 33 and the other (the commander of his "very own tank") is 27. They're not each 33 + 27. But I can see that those numbers add up to 60, and I am 11 years old than that. "Lather" is a song facing the confusion of becoming 30ish. Lather himself has just turned 30, and he seems to be clinging to outright babyhood, as the band suggests maybe that's just fine... or good enough for Lather anyway.

It's a whole other matter breaking into the decade that begins with a 7, which I like to come out and say is the 8th decade of life. Speak plainly! And look for what is good. Some people — the glass-half-empty folks — say that as you get older, with more of your days behind you, each day is a smaller percentage of the total time you have lived, and thus, the days seem insubstantial and short. But the other way to see it is that is that each day now is a bigger percentage of the time you have left. Today might be 1% of the rest of your life. It might be 100%! Are you giving today what it deserves? It is so much.

As I listened to the old rock songs that Spotify had strung together for me, I visualized myself — I was running through the woods — looking over at the me who existed at the time I first heard a particular song — it was "Too Many People" — and I waved at myself in the 70s and sent the message that everything will be fine when you are in your 70s. You'll be able to run — in the woods! — and you'll have this music in your ears because a computer — an "electronic brain," as you call it — will know you like it and will pump it directly into your head. 

And you won't care so much about your birthday, because 2 days after your birthday will be something called your "bloggiversary." There will be something you do for the first time on January 14, 2004, and you will proceed to do it every single day for 18 years and counting....

Althouse is productive, you know....