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The Series That Wouldn’t Die

Can we talk about NCIS for a moment?

23 Seasons. Seriously?!

When I first moved back to Phoenix from SF in 2003 and was staying with my Dad, I got into watching NCIS because that’s what he watched. It was fun, engaging, and justice almost always came to the bad guys (something that was sorely needed two years after the still-fresh wound of 9/11). When I moved out and got back into my own place, the apartment complex I moved into provided their own—and only their own—satellite television service at an exorbitant monthly fee. It wasn’t even connected to Cox for you to bypass. There was no other option. Nope, thanks. I’ll stick with broadcast.

So I continued with NCIS via broadcast TV.

When Sasha Alexander was unceremoniously killed off left the show in 2005 my interest started waning as I realized she was my favorite character. But I stuck with it because—even though I now had real cable available—it was fun, engaging and justice almost always came to the bad guys (something still sorely needed, hip deep into the Bush/Cheney years). And I suprisingly embraced the addition of Cote de Pablo’s Ziva charcter to replace Sasha Alexander.

When Pauly Perrette left the show and more importantly I learned the reasons why, I almost gave up on it again, but it was fun, engaging, yadda, yadda, yadda…

It was only after Cote de Pablo’s brief return to —and departure from—the series followed by Michael Weatherly leaving that my interest started waning altogether. When Mark Harmon (whom I originally discovered many years earlier via Goliath Awaits) left his role as Gibbs to go behind the camera and produce, that was pretty much the death knell for me. To be honest, I gave the replacement cast a couple seasons, but the chemistry that the original series actors had just wasn’t there. Gary Cole, Wilmer Valderrama (I still see him in his role from That 70s’s Show), and Brian Deitzen are all fine actors, but this just wasn’t the NCIS I’d grown to love. It didn’t help that the stories seemingly started to alternate between “let’s scare grandma with the dark web (or whatever boogeyman was current)” and “social cause of the week.”

And then there’re the spinoffs…NCIS: New Orleans was decent enough, but it wasn’t worth recording to watch at a later time. If we missed it, we missed it, and didn’t feel a sense of loss. And as far as the others (NCIS:Sydney immediately comes to mind) are concerned…well, don’t even get me started.

What say you? Do any of you still watch the show? Age-wise from the commercials alone it was obvious I’m was target audience, but I’ve lost interest in the entire franchise and can’t be bothered to even check in on it these days. There are so many other excellent police procedurals out there (a genre that Ben and I both love), that we don’t have time to waste on this pablum.

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And Now For Something A Little Different

So. Many. Stairs.

(But at least there’s an elevator.)

thestudioofchristopherphelps: “Yeah, just like Jagger, start me up and I never stop!

I was thinking about how many professional chefs actually don’t want to cook in their spare time. They really love what they do, but they associate it with work. I’m a little unique in that way. I love what I do, but I continue to draw in my spare time. I keep coming up with new ideas, like this one.

So, I gotta draw it for the fun of it! Ha!

As city lots get divided into smaller parcels because of demand for executive housing near workplaces, the idea of giving up luxury because of these constraints is a creative challenge I enjoy tackling!

In this concept, I call it the “Baldwin Ave City Home”; I attempt to design as narrow a house as possible while retaining decent room sizes and layout. The result is a 21-foot-wide home, featuring all the bells and whistles a luxury home should have: four full-size bedroom/bath suites, an elevator, a study, a club room, a golf simulation room, and a pavilion.

Sure, it is proportionally challenged, but it always draws a surprised reaction when I show it.”

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astrophileez: One of the biggest problems in modern cosmology just became harder to ignore.

Astronomers have two powerful ways of measuring how fast the universe is expanding, and they stubbornly refuse to give the same answer. Measurements of the nearby universe using Cepheid stars and supernovae indicate a faster expansion rate than predictions based on the early universe and our standard cosmological model. This disagreement is known as the Hubble tension. 

For years, one possibility was that subtle errors in Hubble’s measurements were creating the discrepancy. Then James Webb stepped in. Its much sharper infrared observations independently checked the same distance markers and confirmed that Hubble’s measurements were reliable. 

That makes the mystery much more interesting. If the measurements are right, something may be missing from our current picture of the universe. Scientists have proposed possibilities ranging from unexpected behavior of dark energy or dark matter to unknown particles, new fields, or modifications to our understanding of gravity. 

This does not yet prove that new physics exists. But it means one of cosmology’s most persistent discrepancies has survived observations from the most powerful space telescope ever built.

Sometimes the most exciting discovery in science isn’t finding the answer. It’s discovering that the universe refuses to behave the way our best theories say it should.

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It’s Got An Atrium AND A Hobby Room! 🤣

And all this can be your’s for only $30.950!

First off, I’d rip out that hobby room and let it be a dining area. I’d block off about 10 feet on the right side of the multi-purpose room with a door to the space from the foyer, and turn it into an office. The multi-purpose/family room would still be plenty large enough and it would still get plenty of light. I might ditch the carport and enclose the area to create a full two-car garage.

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