ABC's "Once Upon a Time": season 4 has started!

My favorite current TV show, ABC's "Once Upon a Time," has returned, and even though I've got "Scandal" and "How to Get Away With Murder" waiting on my TiVo, I couldn't wait on this one.

[SPOILERS]

That NYT article about Shonda Rhimes

The New York Times stumbled badly with an article about TV producer Shonda Rhimes that described her at one point as an "angry black woman."

BuzzFeed has a long column that explains why the Times' TV criticism is "so bad." The "too long, didn't read" version is that, like everything else about the Times, a combination of arrogance and elitism results in imposing its own worldview on everything, which in this case ended up with a reporter with no background or apparent interest in TV as the chief TV critic.

Rhimes, of course, is notable for having created/produced "Grey's Anatomy," "Private Practice," and "Scandal," and is one of the producers of "How to Get Away With Murder," which happened to be one of the subjects of the "angry black woman" article. All but "Private Practice" are still airing today on ABC (with "How to Get Away With Murder" having premiered last night).

I never watched "Grey's Anatomy" or "Private Practice" (medical soap operas just aren't in my preferred topic of TV shows), but I have seen every episode of "Scandal" through the first two seasons, and the premiere of "How to Get Away With Murder" is sitting on my TiVo. And I would say that "Scandal," at least, does not show anything remotely resembling an "angry black woman" - to the extent I even understand what that means. How exactly is an angry black woman different from an angry white or Asian or Latin woman? (Was Meredith Brooks' 1990s hit single "Bitch" about an angry woman?)

"Scandal" does star an African-American actress, Kerry Washington, as political fixer Olivia Pope. And Pope certainly does have a take-charge persona (except in the interminable scenes with the President), but I wouldn't describe her as "angry." She's not Ms. Spock, of course; she does get angry at times, but that is in reaction to events or circumstances. She is not existentially angry. So it is hard for me to see the Times article as anything but a lazy attempt to construct a narrative - "hey, this African-American woman has her hand in three shows all on Thursday night on ABC, how'd that happen? I know, she's parlayed the 'angry black woman' persona into something marketable!" It seems like the column says much more about the reporter and the Times than it does about Rhimes, or TV.

Weights and cardio

Although I consider myself first and foremost a runner as far as physical activity goes, I don't neglect resistance training. To be sure, I don't obsess about it the way I do about running, and I don't read the weightlifting equivalent of Running Times Magazine or the book equivalent of the Daniels Running Formula. But I do go through a routine of shoulder and bench presses, and upright and one-armed rows, 2-3 times a week with a set of dumbbells at home. And squats and deadlifts when I remember.

The question of how to integrate weightlifting into a running routine is one that I've wondered about, though without much fretting. Apparently, though, it's a common question - does weightlifting inhibit running and vice versa? For the non-elite trainer, it doesn't seem to matter what order you do them, and they don't seem to interfere with each other (except, I suppose, to the extent that being exhausted by one makes it harder to train fully on the other):

“We saw no indications of interference,” said Stuart Phillips, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who oversaw the study.

Perhaps most telling, the order of the exercises in these studies was immaterial. In the 2014 study, the men rode and then lifted; in Dr. Phillips’s study, they lifted and then rode. Muscles, it seems, “can’t tell the difference,” Dr. Phillips said.

Okay, then, that's good to know.

Late review of Fox's "Gotham" and the season premiere of ABC's "Agents of SHIELD"

Fox's "Gotham" might have gotten the highest level of buzz during the summer, so I was pretty keen on checking it out. I'm not the biggest superhero story fan (unless you consider Jack Bauer to be a superhero), but "Gotham" has an undeniably appealing concept: what was the city of Gotham like before Bruce Wayne became Batman?

To be clear, this is not the 1960s Adam West/Burt Ward campfest. It's not even the Michael Keaton/Val Kilmer/George Clooney series of movies, which while considerably more serious than the TV series, were still full of bright colors. Nope, this is very much in the style of the Christian Bale "Dark Knight" trilogy: dark, grim, unrelenting, and mostly unhappy.

CBS's "Scorpion": Review of pilot episode

My TiVo is close to overflowing, as I still have 12 episodes of the second season of "The Americans" to get through, and a bunch of new shows are debuting this week, as well as old ones returning. I decided to start with CBS's A-team of nerds show, aka "Scorpion," to see if it's worth a season pass.

The premise of the show is that a group of social misfit geniuses based in a rundown warehouse in L.A.are the key to fixing crises that are otherwise beyond our government's ability to solve. The most recognizable actors in the show are Robert Patrick (the liquid metal terminator) as the government agent who calls on the misfits, and Katharine McPhee ("American Idol" runner-up; "Smash" co-star) as the single mom of an autistic genius boy.

The crisis in the pilot episode involves a corrupted software patch in LAX that cripples the airport's ability to communicate with airplanes. Unless the problem is fixed, planes are going to start falling out of the sky.

Yeah, it sounds kind of ridiculous. At least in "Die Hard 2," the planes were kept in the airspace above Dulles by terrorists who had commandeered the communications and could issue deceptive orders to the pilots.

And of course, the nerd/genius characters are pretty much what you'd come to expect, more character tropes than actual characters.

Still, this is the kind of show that CBS knows how to produce in a slick, glossy format with neatly packaged resolutions in a 59-minute program. It's kind of like "CSI: Misfit Geniuses," or "NCIS: Nerdville." It pretty delivers what it promises, it's entertaining, and it'll probably get decent to good ratings.

I'll stick with it for now, as it's watchable, and there's hope that it will follow the path of "Person of Interest" (also a CBS show), which started off as a procedural of the week before developing arcs in season 3 that blossomed into a season-long arc in season 3.

Book review: "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets"

I haven't watched "The Simpsons" in about 12 or 15 years, but Simon Singh's The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets is a book that really tickles my fancy despite my having thrown my lot in with the dark side (i.e., law) after my earlier days as a math/science nerd.

I didn't realize that the show has been chock full of so many math puns and jokes, some of which are readily apparent with no special math skills required, and others that take advantage of, say, differential calculus or number theory.

I especially liked the discussion of how one of the writers used a computer to find a set of numbers that seemingly disproved Fermat's Last Theorem, which posits that there is no number n > 2 for which the equation:

x^n + y^n = z^n

where x, y, and z are integers. It's a theorem that some people thought would last the test of time; there's an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where Captain Picard is, in his spare time, trying to prove it in the 24th century. Actually, though, it was proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles, a feat that author Singh wrote about in another book.

Anyway, the Simpsons writer found a set of numbers x, y, and z, which seemed to satisfy the theorem with n = 12. At least, it did if you used a basic calculator that displayed only a few decimal points of precision. If you used a computer, you'd see that it didn't satisfy the equation perfectly.

How neat! And all that work for something that shows up on a chalkboard in the background!

The book contains five sections with math jokes, and I'm pleased to report that I've gotten the humor in all of them so far (I'm about halfway through the book), thus providing some evidence that I haven't completely lost my math/science credentials despite having been in the law school ivory tower for over a decade now.

Should you drink wine instead of working out? . . . Um, no.

 

The Huffington Post has an "article" that people who like alcohol but hate exercise will definitely gravitate toward, as it's titled, "Is Drinking Wine Better Than Going to the Gym? According to Scientists, Yes!"

Now, there's been a lot written generally about some health benefits from moderate wine-drinking, but I don't think I've ever seen a claim that it's better than exercising. Yet, the HuffPo article is lacking in any details and furthermore, lacks a link to the study that it cites: