Modern Vespa

As you mentioned Wallander - another good Swedish police series is Beck.
It's not as 'heavy' as Wallander, the characters being a bit more positive, with a hint of humour once and awhile. Not a very accurate description, but I would say Beck resembles more of 'normal' Swedish life, whereas Wallander is bit like a Swedish police series adapted to an American style.... the Swedes are free to correct me here

I don't know whether that is available only in the Nordic Netflix, but the Icelandic police series Trapped is also worth checking out... a bit more rural take on the murder business.

Thanks for all this! My sister in law is from Lima so she'll be happy to hear she speaks the Ohio/Colorado of Spanish.

Most of our time in Spain has been in Madrid and then down in Andalusia, but last summer we were in the West (Caceres, Salamanca and Zamora) and definitely found our comprehension leaped ahead, vs the South.

Still, for all that, my California-born ear is certainly still more attuned to South of the border vs. across the Atlantic.

No expert, but my Chilanga wife is. I'd go with pinche as something softer than "f'ing"... more on the order of "damned" or a bit stronger. Funny, my Spanish was quite limited at the time, but first night I spent at my wife's apartment, the neighbor's dog was barking incessantly, and she remarked, Pinche perro!" I was all ears...and added a new word to my vocabulary! She's a good and proper girl, so she wouldn't be using the F-word analogue....

If you don't know many Spanish nouns in Mexico, you can always go with "ese chingadera."

One thing I cannot unsee is the scene at the end of the first season of Money Heist where the Professor and Berlín are singing "Bella Ciao" to one another. Something about it - maybe the melody - maybe the fact that they were pronouncing ciao like "tsao", or something else I can't put my finger on, but it just has stuck in my mind as being super creepy...

Maybe not watching but rather playing. FFVII remake on my PS4 Pro. Should give me 30-40 hours of distraction. I absolutely loved the original and easily in my top 5 of all time game list.

*EDIT* Me downstairs in the condo as my wife is upstairs working. I have moved the PS4 Pro to the bedroom and left the Xbox One X upstairs attached the LG OLED. So I'm slumming it down here with the older Aquos but could be worse. You can just make out one of the girls snoozing at the end of the bed. BTW blackout blinds are so worth it. I have left one a little cracked but of I closed it the room would be pitch dark and it's 2 pm and bright out for now. Cantilevered articulated TV mounts are also a great thing.

I know what you mean In the latest season, there is a scene where Berlin's wedding is supposed to be in Italy, where they start singing in italian. I have a hard time following their singing, even though I also parlo italiano. The spanish accent is too thick

Oh, great, thank! Needed that earworm! (btw, I was wrong -- we did in fact watch s.2 of the Money Heist; I'd forgotten that's the one that wraps up the hei...oops, no plot spoilers!). Also, why the f are they singing an Italian protest song??

Anyway, while we're off the rails with slang: what is "guey" (pronounced "whey")? That always gets subtitled (Club de Cuervos, Unstoppable) as "dude" but when we asked our Madrid friends they cringed and suggested it also implies "fag" etc.

Noteably these Madrid friends are gay... and in Madrid, not Mexico...and "guey" seems to be Mexican...and of course Mexicans a) as we've been discussing speak a slightly different dialect and b) are as un-PC as it gets so I wasn't sure how accurate our friends are on this.

Heh, so of course I start singing this from my basement "office" and my wife finds this, which is actually very heartwarming:

https://mashable.com/video/germans-bella-ciao-coronavirus/

Germans singing Bella Ciao in solidarity with Italians.

I saw both seasons of Trapped a couple of years ago. I enjoyed it.
Another good series was 1992, from Italy. I just found out they made a 1993 and 1994 last year, so I've got something new to find and watch.
Deutschland 83, Germany, was a pretty entertaining series, as was Das Boot, Germany, which is based on a movie about the guy who only has one boot.
Lillehammer, Norway, with that guy who plays the guitar in Bruce Springsteen's band, was another neat series.

It's either got the same origin as Weon, which I hear quite a bit. You can also call something la wea, if you don't know what it's called, or even if you do. If you are referring to someone you know, it's a term of affection, if you're talking about someone else, they are a F'ing idiot. They all come from the word huevos, which is slang for balls. Or it might be a bastardization of Buey, which means Ox, another popular sobrenombre (nickname) in Mexico. Gile is the same as the more formal gillipollas, which would make a good "take a shot" word every time you watch anything from Spain.
Around your Spanish friends, it is permissible to ask to coger la Vespa. Not so much in America Latina.

Sorry for the earworm! It really is torture... 😂

We have a Mexican restaurant not too far from where I live called "Los Magueys"...the ignorant southerners that live in my neighborhood pronounce it, "Los muh-GOO-ēz".

🙄🙄🙄

Oh, and perhaps I was mistaken on the "pinche" reference being from Narcos. It's entirely possible (and moreover, likely) that I heard it so much in Narcos: Mexico, and my brain just conflagrated the two.

It is a mexican/guatemalan slang for dude, but it is somewhat derogatory. Did they say "No mames wey!"?

It is not "fag" normally, but could be in the extreme usage, but they (Mexicans) have other slang for that purpose.

Note that spanish spoken in a standard way is universal. A Spaniard can communicate with a Mexican, Colombian, Argentinian, etc. It is in the same way that an englishman can talk to a scottish, american, canadian, or australian, irrespective of the accent. But if you throw in slang, all bets are off.

Watching or watched "Dark" on Netflix. It's in German. There is a choice of dubbed or subtitles, read somewhere that it should be watched with subtitles if you don't understand German; did that and I ended up turning up the volume high even though I need to read the dialog - Great show.
Waiting now for season 3!

Hey I resemble that remark.. probably. As an anglophone Canadian growing up in Quebec my French is passable but my Spanish? I'm sure my pronunciations would be/are horrendous. I would of course try to get it right but have no real reference point except for shows like Narcos which was BTW awesome in my opinion. Ok I suppose you can also count The Three Amigos..

Yeah, I meant slang. Like the "c-word" in England vs. here in the states...fairly different connotations, if not denotations.

...or a million other strange Brit slangs -- slash, bloody, fag (again), fanny...??

Not to mention lorry, boot, bonnet, bisquit...corn fer fecksake!

Tonite we watched Doolittle. I wanted to watch Cats too, for a bad movie night, but the SO wouldn't have it. So we also watched Midway. Midway is pretty good. Dolittle does just that.

Best movies so far: Green Book and Ford VS Ferrari. Both great well acted flicks!
May rewatch Game Of Thrones sans the last episode!

If you want to watch something that will make Doolittle look good, try the Christian Bale Terminator.

We were looking for the same thing you were: something so utterly mindless I could swtich off all consciousness on a Friday night, but all we did was yell at the TV for an hour and a half.

Which, come to think of it, is all Christian Bale did for an hour and a half.

Better Call Saul...brilliant writing

I went back and watched the "Ozymandias" episode of Breaking Bad. It has been called "the greatest hour of dramatic television ever written," and after watching it again, I'm in no position to disagree. It's abso-freaking-lutely incredible.

No [NSR]?

There's this show on BBC Seventy Two or something called Race Across the World that's got my attention lately. It's sort of like the Amazing Race, except that the premise is that you have to go an amazingly long distance, London to Singapore first season, or Mexico City to Ushuaia this season, for the cost of plane fare, but you can't use a plane. And the winners get 20000 pounds, which works out to about $80 dollars or so. Along the way there are places where they can work for room and board, or a small amount of money.
Now that's an adventure. It's one of those shows where you watch it and think, "I could do this so much better," then hear everyone in the show say they watched the previous season and thought the same thing.
Because it's a couple, and the tickets they didn't buy appear to be first class, they start out with about $4000 a couple. I think that if you bought a Honda Hero style bike the first day, you could probably ride the whole distance and win it.
The first season was interesting because none of them spoke Kyrgyzstani or Uzbek (think about all the places between London and Singapore, most of them are countries in RISK), but this year you get the impression that everyone in the show has been on vacation somewhere where they speak Spanish.

I just saw the first season of Frikjent, a Norwegian drama that just got more and more nonsensical as the story unfolded. About half way through, the main character's motivation seemed to be to find a way to be in five more episodes. Good looking cast though.

We're back in to Ozark a the new season is out. Good show and well worth the watch.

... do you really speak Italian ...?

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_ciao

In Italy the song has been linked for many years to the leftist political tradition, especially the communist one ...
It has only been untied from these occasions in recent years, that is, since many radical leftist political movements that sang it during meetings dissolved; today it is taken as a generic song of freedom without political connotations.

Attila,

I rode my Ducati to Florence and stayed at a camp just across the Arno River.
I believe the camp site was called Camp Michelangelo. I picked this camp because they had little A-Frame cabins you could rent. I could lock
my Ducati in the A-Frame and walk into Florence across the Ponte Vechio.

I walked into the Piazza Della Signora at night and there was a large Communist Rally Happening. The Piazza was blacked out with a spot light on the speaker's platform. The packed crowd was all men. Vota Communista signs all over.
This was off tourist season perhaps in the late Fall. It was like watching an old movie - great experience.

Small rural towns that I rode through would have Vota Communista signs up.
This was 48 years ago. Other parties also had their signs everywhere.

Southern Italia was still struggling economically. I expect the communists had a great deal of appeal in those times. Great experience for me.

Comrade Copeland
Minnesota

Yeah, we zipped thru S3 of Ozark a couple weeks ago -- it's a goodun! S1 was utterly brilliant. S2 a bit more formulaic, and S3 a buckin' bronc ride right out of the chute! Compelling and nail biting fun. I especially like how Bateman directs a show in which he increasingly diminishes his own character and grows the female leads in really complex, unexpected ways.

Last night we finished rewatching the first two seasons of Babylon Berlin so we can start S3 tonight. Man, that show is darrrrk but simply stunning. Just unbelievably good and I'd put it up there as one of the most fascinating "films" I've seen in any genre, as in I'd put it up there with anything on the big screen etc. It consistently manages to be both tweaked/bizarre/full of surprises while at the same time immersing you into an absolutely believable world of pure realism.

Like the Tiger King! LOL

And I would like to thank the gods for inventing quality TV before inflicting this plague -- can you imagine sitting this thing out back in the days of Dallas and Magnum PI? No wonder cocaine laid waste to the 80s: there was nothing good to watch.

As you will have seen Bob and as history has taught us, ideologies in times of fast changes like these change quickly ... it was a period dictated by living conditions that improved decreeing its metamorphosis into other forms. The most important and most beautiful thing we have is the freedom to choose and do it with our own head ... the rest comes by itself.

From the sunny city of Latina, in the isolation of the virus and the solitude of the countryside

Attilio aka Attila the farmer

I hate to admit this, but I just started to watch "Love is Blind" on Netflix. What a train wreck. It's awful, but I cannot stop watching.

Mrs. TSG and I have taken to making snide comments as the episodes unwind, yelling our obscene takes on what's going on "Carlton, just admit you're a gay man"..... it makes it more fun.

Kind of like the old show on ESPN called Cheap Seats... two comedians (The Sklar brothers) where they watched old sports clips and made comments on everything.

... oh ... Larry, now i understand why "tsg" ...or no..?
I have no satellite or pay TV, only public or private free TV ...
The TV series I see are old compared to the ones you watch and in any case they put too much publicity here, I often buy DVDs and watch them whenever I like.
I love scientific and historical channels very much, one of the public channels is RAI Storia with many historical contents and especially those that speak of the history of the twentieth century especially in relation to the period from the 1900s to the 1960s.
In particular the First World War and the Second World War.

I finished Money Heist (La Casa de Papel) this morning, and *man*...what a let down! All that buildup, and then practically no resolution to anything! Obviously it's clamoring for another season, but what if (for some weird reason - ex: Daredevil, which was very popular) it doesn't get renewed? Then the story is just dead in the water. That would be terrible...

"Jaque Mate, hijo de puta!" and then it ends? WTF?

I agree with your assessment. Let us hope that there is a next sequel.

Tsg... nothing to do with tv.

Larry
The
Short
Guy

I'm not tall, 1.57 (1,57) meters!

Corona Zombies

Brilliant. If you liked Airplane, What's Up, Tiger Lily, Scary Movie, this is a must see. The jokes are on point, and there are a lot of laugh out loud one liners. If you can't find it, PM me and I'll see if I can find you a link to it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12098392/

Fauda, on Netflix, is a very well put together series set in Israel. A lot of action, shot and paced almost like a documentary, with solid story lines and a very natural feel as it unfolds, plus a lot of guns and car chases.

It can be said that every language that is in a specific geographical region is different from how you move, an example is Italy still today ... an inhabitant of the regions of the extreme north has some difficulty in correctly understanding the common Italian spoken in Campania, Calabria or Sicily, heck ... even I sometimes find it difficult to understand a Neapolitan who screams at the market but only because he mixes some dialectal terms with the "shuffled speech" of his area.
Ask those like Bob Copeland who have lived in Campania or other areas, here it is said that "you have to make the ear"... literally!

Really enjoying Good Omens.

Due to a fortuitous chain of events Neil Gaiman is stuck not far from here. Maybe he'll stay on of his on accord.

We have a show in the US called Naked and Afraid, where two people try to survive in the jungle for 21 days with no clothing, and only two survival items, like a knive and a pot.
I've applied to be on it every season, but so far I haven't been accepted.