Scooby-Doo, Where are you now?

I just watched the CW's Scooby Doo reunion special. It's partly live-action and partly animated, with a cool-looking Mystery Machine van driving through the studio lot. The special appears to be a commercial promotion for a Warner Brothers studio tour, along with appearances from other Hanna-Barbera cartoons that they own. It's not quite as blatant and annoying as the recent Scoob! movie. The host spoke to the Scooby gang as if they were actors who have played the detectives for years and were reuniting on the soundstage where they filmed their old shows. TV clips are interspersed with interviews with actors and other experts who discuss the franchise.

The show has a small mystery about a character dressed up as a Snow Ghost villain haunting the WB studios and scaring people. As the gang investigate, we meet other fictional characters/suspects and eventually one of them turns out to be the villain, when the Snow Ghost is unmasked at the end. There's a laugh track and it's kind of amusing at times. It's mainly just a pleasant hour of nostalgia and fun.

Hilda Adams (Miss Pinkerton)

I've discovered a new lady detective, who is actually a nurse, named Hilda Adams. She works with a police inspector Patton who jokingly calls her Miss Pinkerton after the famous detective agency. Hilda Adams is even written by a woman author, Mary Roberts Rinehart, known as the "American Agatha Christie."

Having been tricked into reading the horrible Hilda Wade book, I was wary about this Hilda Adams, but fortunately, there was nothing to fear! Hilda Adams is everything I had wanted, a competent nurse who helps solve mysteries by gathering clues and reasoning things out. She's not on some ludicrous, convoluted revenge quest, nor is she anti-feminist. There's just a murder mystery to solve, and some characters to get to know. What a relief. The Miss Pinkerton book also taught me about "hypodermic tablets" which are tablets to be dissolved in sterile water before filling a hypodermic syringe with the solution; these tablets used to be a thing before vials were common in medicine. Nowadays they just have the powder in a vial, break it, and reconstitute it with water or lidocaine for injections, so they don't bother forming tablets with it.

Apparently I've started the series out of order. I just finished the Miss Pinkerton novel, published in 1934, but I need to go back and read The Buckled Bag novella of 1914. I couldn't find this novella in ebook form, except on Amazon, so I bought it as a hardcopy instead.

Political Dystopia

Greg Abbott appointed a Trump campaign lawyer to be secretary of state, to further guarantee fucking up Texas elections. Meanwhile, the attorney general Paxton is trying to get the Supreme Court to rule on Texas's abortion law faster than the other abortion cases this year. Roe V. Wade surely is in trouble. :(

Speaking of elections, early voting has started for a bunch of state constitution amendments. Apparently the Texas GOP think that the main problem with the pandemic was governments trying to shut down in-person church services in the name of public health. No, you don't fucking have the right to infect people, when churches could have gone to Zoom streaming or other options! I only heard about this election on Monday and didn't have a day off work to vote until Thursday. I'm already seeing some political ads on TV.

The only good news lately is that booster shots were approved for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, and now you can mix and match booster shots. I hope the approval for kids under 12 will come soon.

Toxic Work Environments

Wow, a lot of disturbing allegations from Ruby Rose about season 1 of Batwoman. The execs forced her to work 10 days after surgery and allowed dangerous working conditions for many other assistants and stunt people. Unfortunately, instead of assuring us that Batwoman is now safe for current stars, Warner Brothers decided to issue a combative statement, claiming that she was fired based on complaints about her. Complaints from whom? About what? Anything at all equivalent to sexual harassment and endangering people's lives? How tone deaf can they be? Who the fuck works this PR for Hollywood types? Why do they think hitting back is the way to go, instead of a simple apology?

It's like when Scarlet Johansson sued Disney over her Black Widow paycheck; her lawyers calmly stated what was in her contract and said that they offered to renegotiate the deal when Disney wanted to release on streaming too, but they ignored her requests. So Disney, instead of being nice and calling it a misunderstanding, decides to accuse her of being greedy and heartless about people suffering because of the pandemic. What the fuck kind of response is that? Instead of addressing the issue about her paycheck or just saying, "sorry, the decision for streaming happened too fast for us to renegotiate with her beforehand. We're happy to negotiate now," they decide to look like jackasses who hate their own talent. Fuck these Hollywood corporations who can't show simple respect for human beings, let alone their valuable stars! I have my own problems with Scarlet Johannson, but even I could see that Disney were totally in the wrong and shouldn't have been shooting their mouths off.

It's like they assume that the audience won't turn against them. Even now, with all the controversy over Dave Chappelle, and the Netflix walkout, I'm only hearing Sarandos apologize for his tone, not his policy of free speech for anti-trans speech. If you really understood the pain you were causing, you'd accept the demands of your trans employees. Maybe you could negotiate in good faith to add a content warning or label like Disney does with its old offensive content. But not even giving a little bit is just horrible. It's like how Facebook and Twitter let hate speech run wild and let Trump violate policies just because he was "newsworthy" and attracted attention. Only now are they reining things in, out of fear of regulation by Congress. Don't let the hate stand.

Indigenous Peoples' Day

I missed the announcement on Friday, but Biden declared Indigenous Peoples' Day while restoring land to some national monuments. It's great, though I wish he had replaced Columbus Day. This is a good first step.

So in belated celebration of Indigenous Peoples' Day, here's a gif from CBS's Ghosts. 

https://t.co/EQIObDK4oi pic.twitter.com/sqLHSeNTTT

— Ghosts (@GhostsCBS) October 8, 2021

(If the image doesn't show, Isaac, a white man, says "We can't let these invaders take our land" and Sasappis responds, "Do you hear it all? Do you hear the words you are saying?")

This is CBS's remake of the British show. The Native American character is new for the American version. I hope he gets more fleshed out as the show goes on. The show has a diverse cast, and I read that the writing staff is diverse too, so good for them. I like that they eliminated the UK romantic poet Thomas and transferred some of his characteristics onto other characters. His continual obsession with Alison annoyed me. So I hope the American show keeps finding new storylines and humor for its characters.