Kotaro Lives Alone

tags: anime series based on manga, Japanese, Netflix streaming 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

10 episodes, 27 minutes

The story is about a lonely four-year-old boy Satо Kotaro who moves in Shimizu Apartments to live by himself hoping to be reunited with his parents. He makes friends with his neighbors including a poor manga artist, a young girl working in a club as a hostess, and a kindhearted thug (yakuza?).

The idea of a four year old boy living alone is absurd but anything is possible in anime. Each episode is funny but also sad and heartbreaking and there is a lesson learned by the adults as well as the children at Kotaro's Kindergarten school.

Kotaro made cute bento with onigiri shaped like his favorite anime character Tonosaman

A 10-episode live action series based on the same manga, Kotaro wa Hitorigurashi (Kotaro Lives Alone), was broadcast in 2021 but I like this current 2022 anime more.

Oliver Stone's Ukraine Documentaries

2016 Ukraine On Fire and its sequel that came out in 2019, Revealing Ukraine - 2 documentary movies on Ukraine produced by Oliver Stone. These should be viewed by all people specially the ill informed who are easily led by corrupt politicians, WEF, NGOs, globalists, and George Soros groups with an assist by their lap dog, main stream media. 

Ukraine has a long history supporting the Nazis and still is holding hands with the current Neo-Nazis/thugs. Watch these 2 movies with an open mind and decide for yourself instead of listening to the constant yammering Uniparty elite politicians and media.  

Cleopatra's Dagger

tags: mystery-ish

from GoodReads

A journalist in nineteenth-century New York matches wits with a serial killer in a gripping thriller by the prizewinning author of the Ian Hamilton Mysteries.

New York, 1880. Elizabeth van den Broek is the only female reporter at the Herald, the city’s most popular newspaper. Then she and her bohemian friend Carlotta Ackerman find a woman’s body wrapped like a mummy in a freshly dug hole in Central Park—the intended site of an obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle. The macabre discovery takes Elizabeth away from the society pages to follow an investigation into New York City’s darkest shadows.

When more bodies turn up, each tied to Egyptian lore, Elizabeth is onto a headline-making scoop more sinister than she could have imagined. Her reporting has readers spellbound, and each new clue implicates New York’s richest and most powerful citizens. And a serial killer is watching every headline.

Now a madman with an indecipherable motive is coming after Elizabeth and everyone she loves. She wants a good story? She may have to die to get it.

I was encouraged by Amazon First Reads last month and was eager to read this highly rated First Reads for April 2022. Alas, it is back to normal FR because the novel is lamentable. Why oh why do these authors insist on being woke instead of writing a mystery suspense novel that everybody will appreciate, not just for the stupid virtue signaling millennials and maybe some ignorant older folks.

"Gripping thriller"...where in the book? There is very little suspense because the author was preoccupied writing about clothing and New York City images in the 1880s, Elizabeth family's wealthy privilege which Elizabeth abhors and feels her moral values is compromised🙄🙄🙄, the obligatory and clichéd beautiful, elegant but cold-as-ice mother, etc. etc. I also detested the unnecessary sexual assault to make the assailant a red herring. Writing style is also not very good as she contrived to sound 19th century.

Ugly. Not recommended for normal sane people.

The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure

Today, March 2, 2022 on Netflix streaming - The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure

tags: comedy, historical fiction, Korean movie, Netflix streaming

⭐⭐⭐⭐

from AsianWiki

A search takes place over the ocean to find the lost treasure of the Goryeo royal family, which disappeared without a trace.

Kang Ha-Neul has frizzy wiry hair and he screams a lot. There's too much screaming in this movie but I still like it.

Kang Ha-Neul

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The 2014 The Pirates movie with Kim Nam-Gil and Son Ye-Jin is better IMHO. It is no longer streaming on Netflix.

Rewinding The 80s

Some of my favorite 80s teen movies. 

The only Sean Penn movie I've ever seen.

Cooking With Fernet Branca

tags: cooking, dark humor, Italy, satire

⭐⭐⭐⭐

from GoodReads

Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he whiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions--including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur known as Fernet Branca. But Gerald's idyll is about to be shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic, as a series of misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity . . .

After reading while laughing out loud the funny Cookbook For Deplorables, I suddenly remembered the hilarious misadventures of Gerree Samper in Cooking With Fernet Branca. I read this book in 2005 and loved his absurd farcical relationship with Marta and vomit-inducing out of this world culinary inventions specially the Liver Ice Cream or Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream. Marta finds the flavor is herb-y but doesn't seem to notice the garlic. She is as weird as Gerald. BTW, Garlic Ice Cream is being sold in California if you want to have a taste. 

I reread it and still love it for its satiric take on travelogues/memoirs such as Peter Mayle's A Year In Provence, which I also loved, BTW. I absolutely agree with Gerald's spot on description of Tuscan bread. I baked the Tuscan-style bread in 2010 for a blogging community baking challenge. Gerald notes:

"There is something radically wrong with Tuscan bread. Frankly it's a disgrace: the one thing to disfigure an otherwise classic cuisine. Even Italians from other regions make ribald remarks about it - like for instance that it's the only bread in the world to emerge from the oven already stale."

The second and third books in the trilogy are equally witty with more of Gerald's acerbic humor and odd culinary experiments

Amazing Disgrace

Rancid Pansies (an anagram of Princess Diana)

A Train To Moscow

tags: historical fiction, Russia

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

from GoodReads

In post–World War II Russia, a girl must reconcile a tragic past with her hope for the future in this powerful and poignant novel about family secrets, passion and loss, perseverance and ambition. In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her own dream of becoming an actress. When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.

Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and his tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage. After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.

It's been a while since Amazon offered a worthy First Reads book. A Train To Moscow is one of  2 free First Reads book for March 2022 I downloaded. I hope there will be more quality books in the future.

The novel starts when Sasha was just 6 or 7 years old and ends when she's in her 30s. The precocious girl is strong-willed and defies her mother and grandparents. She sets her mind in becoming an actress after hearing on the radio Anton Chekov's play Three Sisters because she wants to be a thousand characters instead of living as Sasha. I like the author's writing style, the vivid descriptions of Russia and its caste system during that time, and the story. This is the author's first fiction book.

Highly recommended.