I sent him to the bees

It was a birthday present for him, an afternoon with a local apiarist working on the hives. He came back with grim tales of terrifying bee-haviour. How the workers will kill a queen who shirks her egg-laying duty by clustering around her until she boils to death; how a drone's life entails bumbling around until he does the one thing he's there for only to have his genitals snap off in the act; how queens awakening at the same time will sort it out mano a mano; and how generally bees will fight each other, steal honey and raid other hives, like the organised little thugs they are. 'Bees are MEAN,' was his conclusion. He had a good day. I think. But maybe I won't get the bee tattoo I was considering.

A couple of my favourite series have been cancelled, The Expanse and Lucifer. Seems The Expanse is being picked up, thank god, as the first season was probably the best TV I've watched since True Detective season 1. As for Lucifer...

Well, I loved it. But the show was at its peak, and however unintentionally, the cliffhanger ending is a good place to leave it. I dislike the current habit of things being too long, films that drool on 20 minutes after they should be over, books turned into shaggy dog stories, TV shows that just do not know when to stop; it's an irony that The Big Bang Theory is paying its actors megabucks precisely at the point it stopped being funny* by its own standards. Whatever happened to leaving at the top of one's game?

*Whether or not it was ever funny at all is a contentious issue. Even at its best it was Marmite.