Perhaps President-to-be-elected Harris has already selected her running mate by the time that you are reading this, but she hasn’t announced anything at the time I am writing it. So, you might know more than I do. And I am certainly not going to speculate.

I am also not going to post today anything about Rhode Island Avenue. Rather, my plan is to go back to Rhode Island this morning, and begin the preparation of the next few posts before the temperature rises over my relatively low tolerance level, so we can continue our trip tomorrow or the day after. The next segment should take us from 3rd Street NW to North Capital Street. Then we will go into North East DC for about 30 blocks are so, when we move into Maryland.

So what to write about today? Three shows I have recently watched. You may have watched two of them. I cannot imagine that you have seen the third. Two were recent Netflix series; the third a film that Edie and I saw yesterday at the National Gallery. (The National Gallery shows films you are unlikely to see elsewhere on weekend afternoons.) And what do these three shows have in common with the Trump/Vance ticket? They were all weird.

We finished Friday night watching the new seven part (each part only about 30 minutes) series “Baby Reindeer”. Have you seen it? It was written by a Scottish comic (I use that word only because he uses that word to describe him, not because he makes me laugh) who first put together a semi-autobiographical production which he presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and which, surprising to him, won a major prize. So he did what all fringe festival winners do, he turned it into a full scale production, a show that he traveled with around the world. And then, it becomes a Netflix series, no longer a one-man show, but now a production with a full cast.

Donny Dunn, the protagonist, fails in his first attempt to storm Edinburgh, but meets a predatory TV writer who promises to give him some career help. He then goes to drama school, where he meets a beautiful girl. He moves to London with his girl friend and he tries to become a comic, taking advice from the predatory TV writer, who turns out to be predatory plus. Exactly the man you would never want to meet. Drugs and unwanted same sex sex, all those sorts of things.

To make at least some money, Donny also works at a pub in Camden (you know Camden? Not the one in New Jersey, but the very pleasant “I’d-like-to-live-here” one on the north side of London), and a down in the dumps, bedraggled woman named Martha comes in and says she can’t afford anything. He treats her to a diet cola, her drink of choice.

Martha begins coming in every day, talking to Donny, staying longer and longer, sipping a free soda. Then she learns his email address, becomes his Facebook friend, and learns everything there is to know about him. She wants something more from this relationship; he says just enough to egg her on.

Martha is, it turns out, a graduate lawyer, and a serial stalker, who has served time in prison. She has some emotional problems, to be sure. But Donny, it seems, is as disturbed as Martha is, and neither of them are really fit for normal life. Martha becomes the stalker, Donny the stalked. He claims that his life has been turned upside down. He is correct. But his life, to be honest, has never been upside up.

“Baby Reindeer” is the story of Donny and Martha, and Donny’s girl friend from acting school (no longer his girl friend), and the trans woman whom he seems to maybe really sort of fall in love with, and his parents in Scotland, and the guys at the bar and at the comedy club and, oh yes, the police handling his complaint.

What did I think of the show? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a W for weird. I also give it a U for unique. Also a 7. It’s not a comedy, although it’s about a comic. It’s now and then quite uncomfortable. You might like it.

Next. Season 2 of “Kleo”, another Netflix series. It is a real comedy (I think) with a fantasy plot. I had watched Season 1 a few years ago, although it took me a while to remember it enough to really help me through Season 2. But you can see both seasons now on Netflix. Season 2 only has six episodes, although each episode was close to an hour long. It’s in German and Russian, with a smattering of English. It’s pretty basic German and Russian, the two languages I have studied in the past, and I could understand a fair amount of it……as long as I was looking at the English subtitles while I was listening.

Have you watched any of it? The general plot is that Germany has reunited, but in Berlin there are still those who are both to the former East Germany and to Moscow, and they have formed a group, it seems, to stage a coup to reverse German unification, to recreate the eastern German Democratic Republic, and then somehow to meld it into the Soviet Union as a constituent part. The CIA knows about this plot, and probably isn’t going to worry about its success, but it is interested in the participants because they are said to have a copy of the “Reagan-Honecker Pact”, a document that has some importance that I could never really figure out. I learned what it contains, but I just couldn’t see why that matters.

What else should I say about it? Oh, yes, it is extraordinarily violent. Not the way war movies or movies about the Mafia can be violent, but in the ways that a slapstick comedy can be violent. And yes, this is a comic, with people getting shot left and right, generally in the middle of the head. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Kleo herself is a young woman who grew up in East Berlin and whose family was at the highest rank of East Berlin Communist society, so high that they also hobnob with Russians at the highest levels of Moscow Communist society. She knows the importance of the Reagan-Honecker Pact, and she is determined to get it, so that the world can be saved from whatever it would be like if the Pact wound up in other hands. She is no longer a Communist; she is certainly not a capitalist. And everyone is out to get her, because she is determined, powerful, impossible to stop, and Otto’s granddaughter. Who is Otto? He was the man who came up with the idea of the Reagan-Honecker Pact, and of the plan to take over the government of Germany through a coup. Kleo is under the eye of the wary CIA, and is approached, befriended and not let alone by Sven, a West Berlin police officer, who has been kicked off the force by failing to follow orders, and who would be more comfortable in a Keystone Kop farce than the Berlin police force anyway. His job is to follow Kleo around, and try to keep her from killing everyone she comes across, and to provide comic relief.

The show takes a little suspension of belief (obviously), and realization that you aren’t going to understand everything, and that if people get shot in the head, it’s all great fun, and that Kleo clearly will always come out okay, because if she didn’t have an imaginary shield around her, she would not have made it through Season 1, Episode 1.

Sort of spoiler: Kleo kills her grandfather and her father (to be fair, for a long time she didn’t know he was her father), her father kills Kleo’s mother and tries to kill Kleo, and Uwe – a socialist moron – kills Ernest Honecker (the real former head of East Germany) and his wife, known both as Aunt Margot and the Purple Lady. (You can Google Margot Honecker and see why she deserves this title)

How do I rate this one on a scale of 1 to 10. An 8. I give it a W and a U, as well. But it’s fun, while Baby Reindeer is more of a “let’s see how uncomfortable this can make me” show.

What should I say and “Night and Day”, the film we saw yesterday afternoon. It’s a 2008 Korean film written and directed by Hong Sang-Soo, a prolific Korean film maker, with a very unique style who makes very weird films. You got it: I give it a W and a U on a scale of 1 to 10.

A Korean man, thinking he is going to be arrested on a charge of smoking marijuana, flees to Paris, leaving his wife behind, running into an old girl friend, meeting two young Korean women (much younger than he) and falling in love (so he says) with one of them whom he gets pregnant, and, after two months, returns to his wife in Seoul and leaves his pregnant girlfriend to fend for herself (he told her he had to go to Seoul because his mother was seriously ill). It gets a Rotten Tomatoes 87%, but it’s really an awful film. The next paragraph, quoted from the Wikipedia article on Hong, will tell you why:

“Hong is often spontaneous when shooting, delivering the day’s scene on the morning of the shoot and changing the story on set. He rarely prepares scripts in advance….and writes his scenes on the morning of the filming day, making changes throughout the day….he sometimes shoots scenes while the actors are intoxicated.”

In addition to the W and the U, I’d give this film, still on a scale of 1 to 10, an L. And a 3 (being nice). For long. Not only is the film poorly made and acted, it clocked in at about 2 and a half hours. The National Gallery seems to be showing four or five of his films this August. I wonder why.

By the way, there was something similar about all three. A totally clueless man. No more ditzy young blondes.

Tomorrow, back to more normality here.