A Cat Sits on the Eternal Throne

I have been playing a great new game with the (sadly rather generic) name Eternal. It is a lot like Magic: the Gathering except it is made to play on computers from the very beginning, and so if you are playing on a computer - which you have to be, since Eternal is a computer game - it plays much better than Magic.

When I first started I expected I would be mostly playing the single-player story mode and puzzles (which are great fun by the way - some of them are easy but some of them are so hard that I had to get Professor Cat to help me), because I had bad experiences playing Magic Duels against trolls who would do their best to abuse the timer rules to make games not fun for me. But the mannys who play Eternal on the internets seem to be, for the most part, friendly and happy to say "hello" and "thanks for the game" and sometimes even "nice play!" So you will often find me playing in the Casual mode where playing a fun, friendly game is more important than winning.

Sadly Eternal is not purrfect yet - there are not enough cat cards in the game to make a cat army deck (like I did in Magic: the Gathering) so instead my best deck is full of dinosaurs! Magic has been around a long time though, while Eternal is still a young game and growing. My biggest hope for the game in the future is that they put in more cats.

Here is my current Dinosaurs! deck list, which is a lot of fun (especially when Adaptive Predator shows up) although it probably needs some more refinement:

4 Initiate of the Sands
2 Savage Skybrood
4 Seek Power
2 Equivocate
4 Second Sight
4 Static Bolt
2 Twinning Ritual
3 Auralian Merchant
4 Pteriax Hatchling
2 Ancient Lore
4 Avisaur Patriarch
2 Clutchmate
4 Nesting Avisaur
3 Twinbrood Sauropod
1 Adaptive Predator
3 Predatory Carnosaur
6 Time Sigil
3 Amber Monument
4 Primal Sigil
2 Clan Standard
3 Cobalt Waystone
1 Crest of Wisdom
4 Elysian Banner
4 Seat of Wisdom

And in the market:

1 Twilight Hunt
1 Dispel
1 Xenan Obelisk
1 Twinbrood Sauropod
1 Predatory Carnosaur

Columbo: Candidate for Crime

As good as The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder was, there is one TV Detective series that was even better. It is of course Columbo, the TV Detective we all need, and one of the greatest American TV series of all time.

Candidate For Crime is an episode from the third season in 1973, so 45 years ago, but relevant right now since it is set on the eve of an election, and here the murderer is a candidate for the US Senate - although it seems to me that the days are now long gone when a would-be Senator had to keep his affair a secret for fear of its public exposure finishing his career.

1973 saw the American Vice President resign due to corruption charges, and the President investigated over Watergategate, so they were no strangers to the concept of a criminal politician, but I bet nobody living in those long gone, innocent times could even begin to imagine the sorts of things that those seeking election to high office get away with nowadays!

Jackie "Perry White" Cooper plays an almost archetypal Columbo murderer who does a highly enjoyable turn as he gets increasingly exasperated by the trolling from Columbo, most particularly when he changes his expression in a moment, switching from the mask he wears in public - and when being forced to tolerate Columbo's presence - to show what he is really feeling as soon as he's alone.

As always for the murderers who consider themselves superior to the police lieutenant, he underestimates Columbo until it is too late and this, combined with his unsympathetic two-faced demeanour, makes his eventual comeuppance all the more satisfying for us watching.

The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder

The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder is one of the finest TV Detective series evar. Dating from 1969-71, two seasons were made, one either side of Hugh Burden's memorable appearance as Channing in Spearhead from Space. Burden plays the title character, a mild-mannered, seemingly absent-minded civil servant, who is of course far sharper than he appears. Possessing a "criminal mind" (as is pointed out by or to him in most episodes), Reeder can out-think even the smartest and most dangerous criminals to be found in 1920s London.

Being made in the 1970s and set in the 1920s means there are several episodes that... how can I put it... wouldn't get made that way today, if at all. This includes one instance of Indian characters not played by Indians, and two with 'Yellow Peril' Chinese - the latter including a stage magician character with a 'vanishing lady' trick that could easily have been an inspiration for Li H'sen Chang, and David "Monkey" Collings in yellowface - although, unlike with John Bennett, it is only his character who dons yellowface within the story. The same can not be said for other characters, including the aforementioned stage magician.

Aside from Mr. Reeder, the other main character is his boss Sir Jason Toovey, Director of Public Prosecutions, played by Willoughby Goddard. He is a wonderful comic foil to Burden's Reeder and lights up every scene he appears in, and conveys that Sir Jason is not quite the 'buffoon with a clever underling' that a superficial reading of the character might indicate, and for all that his alternating between blustering at Reeder and sucking up to the aristocracy (his two main character traits) make him seem like a character out of a P. G. Wodehouse story.

Other recurring characters of note are Reeder's Scottish housekeeper Mrs. Houchin (Mona Bruce), whose attempts to feed Reeder with disgusting-sounding meaty meals force him to constantly have to improvise reasons for not eating them, and Miss Bellman (Virginia Stride in season one, then the sadly not as good Gillian Lewis in season two), Reeder's hopeless love interest - hopeless in the sense that it is made obvious to the viewers that each is equally in love with the other, but they are too uptight and restrained by the etiquette of their class and time to act upon it.

The plots are inventive, with little sign of the format becoming stale by the end of the run. There was only one really bad episode, in which John "Bilbo Baggins" Le Mesurier was wasted as a guest star with an implausible death trap in his house, randomly, and which Reeder and Miss Bellman only escape from through chance, not from Reeder's intelligence. At the other extreme, the best episode of the series, titled Sheer Melodrama, sees Reeder tell Miss Bellman that he prefers melodramatic plays to so-called 'realism' at the theatre due to the melodrama plots being more realistic - which is then borne out by the sequence of decidedly unlikely and melodramatic events that then befalls them both.

Out of 16 episodes, only two exist in colour (both from the second season, so I don't know if the first season was originally made in colour or not), and I guess we are lucky that they exist at all.