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Earlier today one of my cats brought in a small rat. He's quite good at catching rats and mice but tends to take them up to my younger son's room and let them go there, alive. I heard a blood-curdling squealing and found this one trapped under the door, half in and half out of the room, with the cat just looking at it from the other side of the door. Figuring that the rat would likely bite the hand that freed it I grabbed some tough gloves from the van before dragging it out. It looked so sweet I didn't have the heart to hurt it - anyway it had probably been minding its own business outside, doing me no harm, when the cat found it - so I let it go in some no-man's-land just beyond the bottom of the garden. Later I was just about to upload this picture of it when the cat brought in another rat (or maybe the same one?!) and let it go at the top of the stairs outside my son's room, again. I spent 20 minutes trying to catch it and get it out of the house (somewhere else this time)!
Our other cat - a pretty little boy-cat, little more than a kitten - used to go in for chasing moths and other flying things, leaping high into the air after them. When the other cat had caught a mouse and was playing with it this one used to watch with an air of puzzlement, as though he really didn't see the attraction, moths and butterflies being much more fun. Then out of the blue one day he brought in a huge rat, half his own size, and (thankfully!) dead as a doornail.
(five, or so, families)
"Coffey, Bates, Hill, Renko, La Rue, Washington, Belker ..."
"OK, let's roll! And hey! .... let's be careful out there!"
Hill Street Blues: when it was first on Channel 4 in the '80s it was the one bit of TV I'd go out of my way to catch. Nowadays the hectic hand-held camerawork, cocktail-party soundtrack and multiple story threads are so familar from programmes like ER they're almost a cliche, but at the time it was radically new. (The portrayal of the effects of police life on officers' personal lives was apparently new to American TV too, though in the UK we'd had domestic violence in Z Cars,[1][2][3] back in the '60s.)
Watching it again today I find it as gripping as I did 20-odd years ago. The writing and acting is brilliant: I feel I really know and care about the characters (whether for them or against them) and there are some terriffic stories. But in particular I think it's the show's use of comedy (often centred around the pompous, gung-ho but gaffe-prone Lt. Howard Hunter) that makes Hill St so special. It's certainly not played for laughs (and we can only thank our favourite deities that it doesn't have ghastly American canned laughter imposed upon it) but the alternation of moments of almost slapstick farce one second with wrenchingly shocking drama the next is gobsmackingly effective.
However only the first two of Hill St's 7 seasons are available on DVD! Given that just about everything that's ever been on TV is now available on video, from Life on Earth to The Magic Roundabout: Director's Cut, with previously unseen material, how come we don't have the entire Hill St canon (with or without sweepings from the cutting-room floor)? Meantime if you see it coming up on TV again please drop me a line!
A religious leader tells his followers to invade and steal the land of followers of a rival. What will happen to the inhabitants? No problem: they are to be slaughtered, every last man, woman and child. Even their animals. And their city burned and every vestige of them destroyed (apart from silver, gold and other valuables which they keep for the Leader).
Nice guy... (more)