Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™

TV & Games

When my son was two years old, a dear friend of my mom’s gave him a Nintendo gaming system that had come out a year earlier. It came with the original Super Mario Bros. game, and my son loved it. So did I. In those days, when you “died” in the game, you had to start over. There was no saving whatever level you reached. There were no cheat codes to get ahead. I know I have a touch of OCD, and that manifested in me staying up all night playing Super Mario, and for days, maybe weeks, I was like a zombie, taking care of my son during the day, and playing that game half the night. Until I beat it. And then I never played it again, not any version of it.

When I was in high school, we got the very first video game, Pong. It was too boring to be addictive though. I played other games, pre-Nintendo, when you had to play in arcades. I loved pinball and Space Invaders. I dabbled with Pacman but never got hooked. My husband loved Asteroids, but I could take it or leave it. I have never considered myself a gamer, yet looking back, I’ve been playing video games for most of my life.

Remember The Oregon Trail? I loved that game. We played it on our first home computer, the Tandy Corporation (Radio Shack) TRS-80 Model 1 (we couldn’t afford the first Apple computer!) Games and everything else were stored on cassette tapes. Beyond Space Invaders, I never got into the shooting games. I detest guns and war as much as I love reading thrillers that feature lots of gun violence and war. It’s a dichotomy I’m comfortable with. But now that we all carry computers in our pockets, there are a lot more games to choose from.

My husband and I watch TV at night, but it is rare that something I’m watching holds my complete attention. (One recent exception is a new movie on Netflix, “Hit Man,” which is excellent!) We watch a lot of news, and I usually read while it’s on. We watch some shows; right now, we are bingeing “Suits” and rewatching “Northern Exposure,” which has held up surprisingly well. We are loving the second half season of “Bridgerton”, and regularly watch Monday’s “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, and Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver on Max (HBO). I watch Jeopardy daily, and read during the commercials. My husband has become addicted to YouTube, and I can read or play games through all of that.

I like to relax after work by rewatching a couple of different series – all of Aaron Sorkin, particularly “The West Wing” and “Newsroom,” plus the “Gilmore Girls” are all on permanent rotation. I also love Sorkin’s other shows, but I can’t access them for free right now. I recently had a yen to rewatch “Ally McBeal,” but it wasn’t streaming on anything I subscribe to. Lucky me, the algorithm pointed me towards “Boston Legal,” which I haven’t watched since it originally aired. It, too, has held up remarkably well, and I am loving it. Because I’ve seen all these shows multiple times, they are a comfort watch for me. I can read since I don’t need to pay all that much attention to the screen.

If I am too engrossed in a TV show, I can’t read, but I can play games on my iPad. I play Backgammon, Spite & Malice, Solitaire, Gin, Hearts, Spades, and occasionally Candy Crush, in that order (OCD, remember?!) I refuse to spend any money on Candy Crush, so it gets boring pretty quickly when I’m stuck on one level.

Every morning, I play the New York Times games and the Washington Post games. I start with WAPO, their morning newsletter, “The 7,” reaches my inbox first. I catch up on the headlines, then play their daily news quiz, On the Record, followed by a super easy word game, Keyword. But then my real fun begins. I subscribe to the NYT “The Morning” newsletter, which I love. At the end of the newsletter are links to their games.

I start every morning with the Crossword Mini, which usually takes less than a minute to complete. Then it’s on to Wordle, followed by Connections, then Strands (out of beta!) finishing up with Spelling Bee. I can generally get to Genius on my own, sometimes with a look at the grid, but have always needed hints to get to Queen Bee. If I have time, I’ll attempt the Monday and Tuesday crossword puzzles. I suck at them, and while I have attempted a Wednesday puzzle, I rarely am able to complete it on my own. The games get progressively more difficult as the week continues, with Saturday the most difficult puzzle and Sunday the largest puzzle.

I believe you need a NYT Games subscription to play all these games. I also love their Weekly News Quiz, out every Friday, and I almost forgot Flashback, a weekly history test of sorts that’s out every Saturday where you have to put eight historical events in chronological order. I’ve put them correctly in order a handful of times, but I usually miss one or two. Flashback and the News Quiz aren’t located with all the other games, so I’m not sure if it works with a Games subscription or News subscription or no subscription! If you aren’t a subscriber and can access it, please let me know. The NY Times has a few other games as well, but I rarely play them. And good news if you just want to play games, you don’t need to have a NYT subscription to subscribe to Games as they are a separate entity, as is NYT Cooking, which I highly recommend. You can subscribe to any of those alone, or bundle everything into one terrific package.

Book News

I’m very excited to tell you that you can subscribe to and read The Washington Post Book Review weekly newsletter, written by the very witty Ron Charles. It is my favorite read about books. He said,

“Remember, free features like this either grow or die, so please tell your friends who might enjoy this newsletter that they can read it every week by clicking here.

(No, they don’t have to subscribe to The Washington Post.)”

7 ways to take your book-reading experience to the next level

This was so interesting! I’ve read the entire Bridgerton series and my husband and I have been watching as well. There is some divergence from the books, but in a good way, I think, especially the diversity of the cast. I also love how they take modern music and create waltzes from it. The homes are incredible, and for what they are worth, now I know. Check it out!

Food News

For a food that begins with just flour, water, or sometimes eggs, there are infinite variations of pasta. So what happens when you convene a panel of five Italian cuisine experts and ask them to determine the 25 most essential pasta dishes throughout Italy?

Croissant mashups: A (not-so-brief) history since the Cronut

Cronuts and cragels and crozels and cretzels. Croffles and croiffles and cruffins and tacros.

More than a decade ago, French pastry chef Dominique Ansel unleashed an unstoppable force upon an unsuspecting world: the Cronut, a doughnut-croissant hybrid that drew blocks-long lines to his Manhattan bakery and became an overnight international hit.

My husband and I stood in that Cronut line for well over an hour, but they ran out before we could get one. We’ve had many of the imitators, the Dunkin Donuts version was especially awful, but never the real thing. Someday!

Dr Pepper is now as popular as Pepsi. It’s still shrouded in mystery.

Does it contain prune juice? Was there an actual doctor? And more questions about the quirky soda.

Other News

Summertime and the reading is beachy! I do love me a good beach read, and they are plentiful this year. There were a couple of weeks last month where I swear, every book I read had “summer” in the title!

As always, thanks for reading, and stay safe.

Thanks to The New York Times and The Washington Post for allowing me to “gift” my readers with free access to these articles, a lovely perk for subscribers.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 1st, 2024 at 9:00 AM and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.