An ode to Tubi

My father-in-law remarked:

“I pay for all these streaming services, and which do I end up watching? The free one: Tubi.”

Hear, hear. I could go on about Tubi … and Canela, Freevee, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, and Pluto (not to mention subscribable services like ViX that provide a surprising amount of free content). But, for now, let me just discuss Tubi.

I’m scrolling through my queue. I’ve added classic cartoons and movies; trashy old TV movies; British TV; Australian TV (Crime Investigation Australia and Crimes That Shook Australia); and a low-budget documentary series, Village of the Damned, about crime in Dryden, NY, some 20 min. east of Ithaca – not a topic of universal interest, but an alluring one for this ex-resident of Tompkins County.

Indeed, to scroll through Tubi’s main page is a revelation. This isn’t Netflix’s conveyor belt of formulaic, in-house content. No, Tubi is still a chocolate box, in the Forrest Gump sense.

Stay gold, Tubi, stay gold.

Weather; counties; coasts; body-text fonts, pt. 9: Primer/Century 751

I waited for snow to fall this year to begin reading my first Henning Mankell novel – Faceless Killers. A few pages in, I learned that it doesn’t snow a lot in southernmost Sweden. So much for the book’s cover photo.

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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:

Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1

Platte County is the outlier.

“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)

Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.

Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.

Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.

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This month’s body-text font is Primer.

This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)

A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.

Some lessons in geography

Today was warm and dry enough for strolling – Samuel was pleased.

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I’ve been watching Capitani (Netflix). It’s a typical cop show, but the episodes are just 24 minutes long. That’s about all I can view without having to pause to look after Samuel.

The show’s location isn’t obvious at first. The language is sometimes like French, sometimes like German.

Switzerland?

No, not mountainous enough.

(The land is hilly and lushly vegetated, like my beloved upstate New York.)

Then I figured it out. Luxembourg. Aha.

Apparently, there are stark regional differences in that nation. The show’s “northerners” and “southerners” constantly disparage one another. So do city and country folk.

This show is set in the country. Village life is comfortable and modern. Houses aren’t especially rustic.

The army is always conducting maneuvers in the forest.

Everyone knows everyone else. Even so, it’s possible for citizens to disappear from the police.

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Disoriented from this excursion into such a vast and untamed land, I put on some YouTube videos of San Marino, another country I’d never visited on TV or in the flesh. San Marino is easier to comprehend.

The government is seated in a castle at the top of a mountain – the country’s highest point. From there, one can easily gaze out, across ten Italian kilometers, all the way to the Adriatic.

Also, there are tourists everywhere.

I look forward to viewing the cop shows of San Marino.

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It would be remiss not to also mention Un mundo inmenso, my favorite geographical YouTube channel (Samuel is fond of it, too).

Finally, I recommend these photos of a yellow penguin. HT: National Geographic.

Hoosiers

Karin & I watched Hoosiers tonight. It was the first time Karin had seen it. I’d seen it many times, but not for several years.

The kitties watched with us.

John-Paul: “Jasper, are you a Hoosier?”

Karin (for Jasper): “Yes, I’m a son of the state.”

The last time I’d seen Hoosiers, I was living in upstate New York. Somehow, this time, I didn’t recall that Norman Dale (the Gene Hackman character) had coached in Ithaca.

On this viewing, I was unsettled by how awfully the Indiana townspeople treat Norman. What always used to seem like a plot device or local color or even comedy this time impressed me as straightforwardly realistic. The self-loathing townspeople are suspicious of any assured outsider who’ll settle among them; they set themselves against Norman from the beginning. “Upstanding” citizens, men who hold power, nearly run Norman out of town; but the same poisoned attitude is evinced by an “enlightened” schoolteacher (Barbara Hershey).

Yes, I thought, I’ve seen this sort of thing in Indiana (and not only in Indiana).

Of course, by the end of the movie, Norman has repaired the basketball team and steered it toward glory, gaining the town’s allegiance and pulling up some of its sad-sacks (the players, the aforementioned teacher, and, especially, the town drunk, movingly portrayed by Dennis Hopper). It’s hard not to rejoice in the conclusion. “That was such a nice movie,” Karin said; and I agree.

Whether the ending is credible depends on whether one believes in divine grace. Norman isn’t much of a Christian; apart from that detail, though, he is a tenacious missionary.

Let me be clear that I haven’t intended to denigrate Hoosiers, even if this time I’ve viewed it with a jaded perspective. This is my dear grandpa’s favorite movie – and with good reason. What it celebrates about Indiana, it shows lovingly and truly. The best thing about the movie is its compassion – for a people, and for the worker who goes to them. This is evident from the first shots of him traveling, lonely, between fields at dawn, surveying the countryside, hoping for a new beginning.

Our trip to the east

A fright

Last night, we were zipping along the Ohio Turnpike at 70 mph when the gigantic face of Chucky the killer doll loomed over us on an outdoor theater screen. Karin almost drove off the road.

Airbnb

It was our first time using the service. It went very smoothly and cost just $40.

Breakfast at a hipster restaurant in Cleveland

Karin’s colleague asked her to send pictures of our meals.

So Karin photographed my burrito:

The Southern Tier Expressway

This is one of my favorite U.S. roads. It’s fast, uncrowded, curvy, hilly, and lush. It runs next to gorges, small towns, and picturesque 19th-century farms with red barns and grazing cattle.

We stopped for lunch at Tim Horton’s in Jamestown. The steep streets and old buildings reminded me of Ithaca (still almost 200 miles away) and considerably lifted my spirits. Until then, I hadn’t realized how strongly I’d missed the region.

Our baby did summersaults in Karin’s belly all afternoon.

The old Salvationists

Karin got her first glimpse of Ithaca from several miles away. She marveled at its beauty. But rather than enter the city, we turned up a narrow, steep road to the town of Danby. There, the Salvationists were eagerly awaiting us.

They gave us supper and recited their ailments. But, to me, they seemed not to have aged very much at all.

Karin’s birthday; tomorrow’s World Cup qualifier; this year’s philosophical job listings

For her birthday, I went with Karin to a stir-fry restaurant at the mall. I also bought her this spiffy coloring book:

Its pages, colored, should look like this:

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Tomorrow is the do-or-die game in Chile. I’d say, “Please pray for Ecuador to win.” But does Ecuador deserve to qualify for this World Cup?

Arguably, no.

However, the Chileans certainly don’t deserve to qualify for this World Cup.

Please pray for Ecuador to win.

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It’s job-listing season for philosophy departments. Despite my hard work this year, it again looks as though my dissertation won’t have progressed far enough for me to be a viable candidate.

Were I to finish the current draft by the end of this month, job-wise it’d still be too late.

I can dream, though.

One job is at a Wesleyan liberal arts college in lovely, rural, upstate New York. It involves helping to “build a program” with one or two other professors. Translation: I could teach in several different subfields outside of my own area of specialization. That’s something I’d very much like to do.

Several other jobs look good because of the nearby mountain scenery. (Actually, there are very few such jobs.)

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This year, even more than usual, political philosophers and moralists are in high demand. This trend is to my advantage.

In especial demand are philosophers who moralize about race. I believe that race is a very important topic. But this recent philosophical emphasis on race leaves me uneasy: it has a whiff of fashionableness about it. In other words, I doubt that the attention now bestowed upon race is a manifestation of good faith.

Still, if I do think of anything worthwhile to say about race, I’ll try to write it in a paper.