What are the TV series you're enjoying, current or past?

That one is also untrue unfortunately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/****

 

Episode 3 of Resident Alien is airing now in the UK.

According to Wiki, it's on Wednesday nights on Syfy in the US, and Thursday nights on Sky One in the UK...
Since we get Syfy in the UK too, I wonder why it ain't on Syfy here?
Well....
I know the answer to that one actually...
Because we're weird because we're foreign;
UK:
The Simpsons is on Sky One
Family Guy!/American Dad!/The Cleveland Show is on Fox
Futurama is on Sky One
Rick And Morty and other Adult Swim Shows are on E4
South Park and Bob's Burgers is on Comedy Central

It's not a new thing either.

In the UK, back in the day;
Sabrina The Teenage Witch was on Nickelodeon
Boy Meets World was on The Disney Channel
Teen Angel was on The Disney Channel
Sister, Sister was on Nickelodeon

Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Boy Meets World, You Wish and Teen Angel had a whole cross over that in the UK was spread over 2 networks and UK didn't even get You Wish, so when Salem went to the 1950's, I had no idea until I was an adult and saw that on YouTube.

When the cast came to the UK to promote these shows, they would be on either Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel.
(Tia and Tamera came to the Nickelodeon studio here, Rider Strong did bits for The Disney Channel walking around the UK, as did Will Friedle)
I think in the US Kenan & Kel was Nickelodeon too, that stayed the same and was Nickelodeon here too.

 

I thought yours was a clever variant, off the bat, but I now wonder if it might have simply been a mistake (in which case, your alternate translation of those initials, actually spells: R-Ape).

 

Oh, I hadn't realized we were looking for words that actually came from abbreviations. Well that lets out all really old words, like the one T.R.O.L. cited. The first that comes to my mind, though, includes Rhet's word: SNAFU (situation normal all fu¢ked up).

 

Also FUBAR.
The US military do seem to be world leaders in acronyms.
My father who served in the British Army always referred to the waste paper bin as the WPB but I've never heard it used elsewhere so it may have been one of his own.

 

To tie everything together-- abbreviations, the military, and tv shows-- let's not forget SONAR & Radar (though B.J. is a reversed example of the phenomenon).

 

RAdio Detection And Ranging was my father's field.

 

Thank you. Any increase in my knowledge of etymologies is welcome

 

And I'd always thought it to be straight Anglo-Saxon. I think because a fiction book said so to avoid saying it. Never trust fiction

 

How about OSIAT
Oh **** It's A Tank
Don't know where it's from but purportedly dates to WWII.

 

It's a fascinating subject.

 

Cool coincidence. What years are we talking about?

Secondarily, you caught my references to the American show, M*A*S*H, right?

Another, probably false etymology, which is fairly well-known among waiters, is tip, claimed to originate from, "to insure promptness." But, even if the dictionary doesn't back that up, I would want to know the year the word came into use, before I made a final judgement on it.

 

Unfortunately the two finger salute story is not true either. It's said to have been used by the French when facing the feared English archers. The story goes that they would cut off the two fingers used to draw the bowstring when they captured a bowman and would taunt them with the salute before a battle.
There is no historic record of this though and in fact English archers were so hated that they would simply kill them.

 

For myself, the current series I'm still following is Snowpiercer.

I'm still looking for them to bring back Westworld for at least 1, maybe 2 seasons.

Ozarks has one more season to go.

Better Call Saul is another one.

 

He did his National Service in the REME (Royal Mechanical and Electrical Engineers) between 1958 and 1960 and saw active service in the Malayan ''Emergency''. It was never known as a war for insurance purposes. His career in RADAR came after though and continued until the late '70s.

No, I missed the MASH reference.

 

and my maternal grandparents in WWII, in fact, they met working on RADAR.
My grandfather was an engineer, he helped develop what later became autopilot working on RADAR in WWII for the RAF.
My grandmother was on RADAR watch with the WAAF, she would have to be perched up against an old-timey computer screen looking at the skies over her patch/RADAR site in Southern England (so was under the command of General Eisenhower).

(Not my grandmother, but my grandmother's WWII job).
She said the plotters who she would have to give the information to were the poster shot who got all the glory while she and her team worked in the background relaying positions to everybody.
Due to the nature of the screen watching's effects on the body, they had to take it in turns, they also had to see where everything was going and to identify things on the RADAR Screen; if it didn't radio back she had to mark it with an H for hostile, if a pilot was in trouble, they pressed a button that sent back the signal turning their circle into a square shape; She raised me and so passed down some of that working knowledge to me.
She was picked for that from Grammar School after getting a scholarship from here Eleven Plus, basically she finished school at 16 instead of 11, 11 being the normal school leaving age back then; she had to work with that computer and read out the trajectory; and be able to calculate and work out its trajectory if the computer failed, and she said it failed once so had to do it that way, even explained how she did with an example as she told me her story; she went into teaching after WWII (comprehensive in Clapham, around the corner from Brixton, taught special needs; the UK school system was a little more racist back then as they initially classified people from the Windrush as special needs fearing they won't last the winter here... It was teachers like my Nan who evaluated these kids from the Windrush and told the school board they weren't retarded; on the most part; she told me of a child who had a coconut fall on his head that gave him brain damage, so he got to stay in her class, but she spoke of all the smart young girls who she had to explain weren't special needs.
She passed in early 2019 aged 94...
Which is a good thing since she was a hypochondriac who stocked up on bottled water for Y2K, so I know Covid-19 would have been her nightmare come true.
She adored Facebook, loved her laptop, was pretty active until the stroke, died 3 months later.

 

The radio operator on the seminal show was nicknamed, "Radar." And one of the doctors went by just the initials, BJ. (MASH stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital).

As for your father, I'd been curious to find out if he'd come in RADAR's earlier days; though the atomic bomb came along in the last scene to steal the show, for the bulk of WW2, RADAR had actually been the technology most due the credit for giving the Allies an edge.

Wow-- I just read Rhet's (I hope he's OK with that nickname) preceeding post! Did you two realize you had this connection?

 

How did I almost forget to mention it? There's also
GAYDAR (a British invention):

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...GMAB6BAgBEAs&usg=AOvVaw1mqZa7JI-3_44vtnN7_pXm

 

No, my father wasn't born until 1936. Along with RADAR the codebreakers at Bletchley Park were our biggest weapon against the Axis forces. The Germans had no idea that ENIGMA had been cracked and the advantage that gave us was huge.

Yeah, Radar was so named because he always knew there were incoming injured before anyone else could hear the choppers bringing them.

No I didn't know about Rhet's grandparents.
My paternal grandfather was Durham Light Infantry who fought in North Africa and was a career soldier. My maternal grandfather Monty was RAF serving with Shark squadron 212 also in North Africa but he was commandeered by military intelligence for the invasion of Italy due to him speaking Italian fluently.

 

This thread has veered off-topic several times. Hey, my friends, all the other discussions are interesting, but shouldn't we go back to the topic, that is, TV series? Maybe some other thread should be started for the other conversations. Thanks.

 

Apologies.
I find that a good thread will always find its way back to the topic at hand though.
I just found The Great Escapists on Amazon Prime.
Well worth a watch.

 

All night Fox air 2 episodes of American Dad!, 2 episodes of Family Guy! back to back, so it's an hour of one, then an hour of another.
For over 10 years now.
Right now it's Family Guy!
From either 21:00 or 22:00 or 23:00 (depending on the night) to 4:00.
Thanks to this, it's a staple for background TV/is a go to for me.
It's something to watch in the night.
Thanks to Fox+1 (IDK if other countries do this, but +1 is the same thing only an hour later); I get to watch these shows until 5 am.
Right now I have S10E14 'Be Careful What You Fish For', the dolphin episode where Ricky Gervais voiced a dolphin, which I just found out makes me like an half hour behind because I remember now I paused TiVo for like half an hour and I thought it was being broadcast now. Yay though, I get to fast forward through this advert/commercial break.
In the UK, we have 1 ad break in the middle of a TV show.
Which made me watching TV in America confused when I saw end of show, then ad break, then credits roll, then ad break.

https://www.foxtv.co.uk/schedule/fox

 

I posted this in the other thread by accident. Too late to delete

I have finally identified a genre of movies and TV that have long escaped their proper identify,

There is hard sci fi, which attempts to follow scientific laws and principles directly. It allows for speculation and the supposition of ideas, but from there it follows real science and logic and closely as possible. Perhaps the best example of this genre of sci fi is the movie Primer. You have to love real science, or at least love logic, to love Primer.

Then there is classic sci-fi, like Star Trek. This attempts to maintain a scientific basis but not rigorously so. The authors have no problem inventing new concepts when needed to advance the plot.

The other genre of movies and TV that often get labeled as sci fi is really fantasy. I have often heard people refer to Harry Potter as science fiction. LOL! Not by a long shot! That is pure fantasy.

Then there is the genre I have always just labeled as bad sci fi. I mentioned earlier that I tried watching one that was really bad... I have already forgotten the name. The newest is called Salvation, which is a series about a planet killing asteroid coming to hit earth. It is horrible!!! Almost any reference they make to real science is total nonsense. It is just a bunch of technical-sounding word salads strung together and pretending to mean something. Suddenly it dawned on me that this isn't just bad sci fi...

At best it is pseudo-science fiction. Although some is so bad I really want to call it crackpot-science fiction. And in fact it is all just total nonsense.

 

One series that I really liked was Carnivàle, which I watched many years ago. Not to be confused with Carnival Row.

Carnivàle (/kɑːrnɪˈvæl/)[1] is an American television series set in the United States Dust Bowl during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The series, created by Daniel Knauf, ran for two seasons between 2003 and 2005. In tracing the lives of disparate groups of people in a traveling carnival, Knauf's story combined a bleak atmosphere with elements of the surreal in portraying struggles between good and evil and between free will and destiny. The show's mythology drew upon themes and motifs from traditional Christianity and gnosticism together with Masonic lore, particularly that of the Knights Templar order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivàle

I haven't spotted a place to watch it yet. Correction, Prime has it but at $20 for season 1. Same for season 2.

 

I call Comedy Central (UK) 'The Friends Channel' because The One Where Everybody Finds Out is on in the background, before that The One With Joey's Bag was on.
From 2 pm to 8 pm actually. (that's not its only time slot either).
Everyday.

I'm actually enjoying it though.

https://www.comedycentral.co.uk/tv-schedule