Cereal: Someone on my friendslist linked to this Simon profile...it's long, but good reading. [link]

Erika - do you have a Treme source? Do you need one? I'm going to be DVRing it, and I can put it on a DVD.

Not currently, no...would you do that? That would be terrific, Frank. Thank you.

Not currently, no...would you do that? That would be terrific, Frank. Thank you.

Email my profile address with where I should send it. No problem. The big question - do you need instant grat, or can you wait for maximum volume of episodes on a disc? I'd prefer the latter, but have no problems with the former.

PS - I probably won't check my home email 'til Monday. Ironically, at work. Not fond of being on the computer during off-hours since I'm on it almost 100% at work. Go figure.

I guess more episodes, Frank. Even so, it's better than waiting a whole other year for DVDs to come out. Thanks. Insent, momentarily.

I guess more episodes, Frank. Even so, it's better than waiting a whole other year for DVDs to come out. Thanks. Insent, momentarily.

I'll probably split the difference and do four episodes a disc (my DVD recorder does up to 8 hours plus change). So you can probably expect the first disc sometime mid-May.

Thanks...that's so great. I need to come up with some content soon, so I can feel less like the fiend begging Mr. Omar for a fix till Thursday.

Yay, Erika.

One of these days, I'll cycle back to more comment on Big Love. It was break-neck, but also had one of the greatest lines, by Nikki, "You can't be thinking of getting married with the most horrible words on Earth, '...'till death us do part'!"

Now I'm into The #1 Ladies Detective Agency and loving it. It's very faithful to the books and it makes me really happy to actually SEE Botswana after all these years of imagining it (via books on CD, another excellent reader+material. Lisette Lestat, Lecap, something like that, is the reader).

Goodman lays out the dif between The Wire and Treme:

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Simon and Overmyer dip those moments and their characters into the trouble areas of New Orleans - "underfunded, undereducated, impoverished, with little tax base and a dysfunctional infrastructure" - to get beyond the postcard mentality. "We love the music, the dance, the food," Simon says. "But the city and its people?"

If "Treme" is about anything, it's the latter. And this other notion, too, according to Simon: "What happens in New Orleans matters. An ascendant society rebuilds its great cities."

In some ways, that's the starkest delineation between "The Wire" and "Treme." If five seasons of institutional failure on "The Wire" was a bleak indictment of Baltimore (and the country), it takes only one episode of "Treme" to sense the hope.

Treme was quite good. Definitely a portrait of a city and its people, without a lot of hand holding w/r/t local phenomena (e.g. "second lines" and "Indian Chiefs", neither of which I was familiar with). Plus a hell of a cast and great music (and lot of it - I'm curious if that level will be maintained for the whole run). The only downside is you can't eat the food when they get on to that topic, but with Kim Dickens representing that world, I'm happy.

Not sure where it's all going yet, if it's actually going anywhere, but since it's about surviving and rebuilding, the journey's probably the thing, not the destination.