I didn’t know this then, but “Where in Time?” is the only Carmen property to feature a live version of the character, with an actress performing the role on screen. This meant there was actually a real Carmen Sandiego, but the show tried to downplay its decision and never revealed who played the role, leaving the credit a mystery.
The year 2016 has been a bleak one for humanity. I’ve had a hard time falling asleep many nights after long days of seeing horrible news followed by more horrible news. The world has always been filled with both good and evil, but this year certainly seems to have awoken an inflamed inspiration from those who conduct the latter.
As a lowly content creator on the internet, I am obviously powerless to make this stop in any meaningful way within the scope of my day job. But since this year marks the 20th anniversary for “Where in Time?” I decided I could at least go after the villain I grew up with in a quest to bring a very small smidgen of justice to the world.
I needed to finally find Carmen Sandiego once and for all.
Even for a novel about an alcoholic writer and bartender, my book has a lot of bars. Sixteen, in fact: sixteen instances in which characters appear at sixteen different bars. Seemingly at every chance, Richard, The Grand Tour’s protagonist, walks into bars, sits down, and drinks. I knew the book featured a lot of bars, but sixteen is more than I’d imagined, and it raises some troubling questions. Whence these many saloons? Whither these sundry watering holes? And what’s wrong with diners, or teahouses, or hookah lounges?
So, will Father Reginald be the agent for Arabella’s eventual comeuppance? Or will the implacable dowager trample over the forces of good and achieve her dreams? My lips are sealed. Still, if you prefer your summer entertainments somewhat tart — a mixture of gin and bitters — you’re in for a treat.
“It is perhaps true that the best way to get to know a people is to sleep with them,” writes Donald Richie about halfway into The Inland Sea, “but this is complicated in Japan.” That hardly stops him from trying, however. In this account of a journey through the towns and villages of the titular “landlocked, lakelike body of water bounded by three of Japan’s four major islands” appear a memorable cast of partners: an island girl, barely of high-school age, who invites herself into Richie’s room; a brash, young yakuza cast into exile as a Buddhist acolyte; a sailor, even younger and more severe, who quashes his sexual urges with buckets of cold water; a pouting prostitute with whom a bar owner all but swindles Richie into spending a dire evening; a kept woman whose name he never catches, but with whom he imagines an entire blissful life together as, late in the book, they talk until sunrise.
Hillary Clinton has said that if she is elected president, she won’t have Bill pick out the china. Another thing the former president won’t be doing? Facing off against Melania Trump in the Family Circle First Lady Cookie Contest.
That’s not to say the Clintons aren’t participating in the 24-year-old contest, which opened its public ballot today on the magazine’s Facebook page. But the recipe they submitted isn’t Bill’s — it’s Hillary’s original recipe from 1992, now called the Clinton Family’s Chocolate Chip Cookies. The contest no longer focuses on first ladies, either — it’s been renamed the Presidential Cookie Poll.