Trawling Through The Thrift Stores With Joseph Finn

  Happy Thursday!  The cold is coming here in Chicago, so before we get into serious winter let's see what nonsense I discovered at the thrift stores this week.

It is a little odd that I've started to get back into Smallville, what with the NXVM trials going on and Alison Mack almost certainly going to prison for recruiting people into a cult.  But I will think this is a good series that kind of set up the basic of the Arrowverse on CW (and Welling and Durance both have made appearances there).  Sometimes, you just need fun, positive superhero stuff and this is a pretty darn good version of Superman.

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Last year, one of the best movies of the year was Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.  It was an alternate-universe story of how the Manson family tracked down and attacked (and in the real world) killed Sharon Tate and the friends who were staying with her.  There's only one moment in the movie where we see Manson as he basically just strolls past Tates and her neighbors.  Now, this, from the writers and director of American Psycho (one of the best movies of the last 30 years), we get their take on the women of the Manson cult.  This one is something I have no seen, but I'm very curious about this version and also seeing Matt Smith (the 12th Doctor in Doctor Who) as Manson.

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I know Isaac Asimov is rightly kind of considered these days as a relic of the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, one of those guys who wrote a lot of stories abotu Serious White Men in Serious White Coats (which Asimov, a PhD in biochemistry, was)...but I still quite like these days his stories, which had a weird sense of humor to them.  Are they still mostly about men?  Absolutely.  Does he once in a while just nail it with a woman like Susan Calvin, the creator of robotics?  Yes.  So this was a nice find to me, even if this volume doesn't have a lot of the robot stories.

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Has ER kind of been forgotten as one of the prestige dramas in the last gasp of the big three networks?  This was a great fun series that should be better remembered for things like how it's Clooney's big breakthrough, for giving us director Mimi Leder (who would go on to direct the excellent Deep Impact) and for several production people being a ramp-up to The West Wing.  So yeah, I've started stockpiling this to watch it from the beginning.

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Wait, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a YA novel?  OK, I'm intrigued.