Category: Internet

‘The Americans’, all six seasons

I am a diehard fanatic of only a handful of books, movies, and musical oeuvres. And I evangelize only a subset of those.

For example, I love the music of Rush and Iron Maiden; but I don’t consider the appeal of these bands to be universal, by any means. Likewise, I realize that a coming-of-age movie that spoke volumes to me in 1984 might not have the same significance for a teenager of 2024. Or for a Boomer who was a teenager in 1964, for that matter.

But everyone should see The Americans.

The Americans is part family saga, part period drama, and part espionage thriller. The show is set in both America and Russia during the last decade of the Cold War.

I watched The Americans in its entirety during the show’s original primetime run on FX from 2013 to 2018. During those years, I looked forward to each new episode.

I loved the series so much, I recently decided to watch it again. But as is so often the case with these modern conveniences of ours, the situation has been made less convenient than it would have been in pre-Internet days. No longer do non-primetime shows circulate to rerun syndication in non-primetime hours. They move to paid streaming platforms.

If you want to see all six seasons of The Americans in 2024, you have several options. You can pay to download each episode from Amazon, or you can purchase a subscription to Hulu, where the series is now streaming.

Or you can purchase the complete series on DVD. I determined this to be my best and most cost-effective option. The above package arrived on my doorstep from Amazon yesterday.

I look forward to watching this series again from beginning to end. And if you haven’t yet seen The Americans, you might consider buying the DVDs, too. They are still in stock on Amazon.

-ET

Shaven armpits, manscaping, and the hairy question of beauty

Paris Jackson, the only daughter of the late Michael Jackson, recently posted an Instagram video in commemoration of her father’s birthday. She received some negative remarks about her armpit hair.

Based on the photos I’ve seen, Miss Jackson’s armpits are unshaven but trimmed, not what I would call overgrown or hirsute, by any stretch.

But this raises a question. How does untrimmed body hair affect beauty and sex appeal? Body hair—on both men and women—seems to go in and out of fashion. National and cultural factors also seem to exert an influence.

I am naturally hairy, for better or worse. I had chest hair when I was still in junior high. I also have hair on my arms, legs, and back.

I was born too late to capitalize on all this excess bodily carpet. In the 1970s, chest hair was associated with male sex appeal and masculine virility. Burt Reynolds and a handful of other hairy male celebrities drove this trend.

By the time I reached full adulthood in the 1990s, however, things were going the other way. This was the dawning era of the manscaped metrosexual.

Then both men and women began trimming and shaving their pubic hair. I won’t go too far down that line of inquiry, so as to keep this post safe for work. But the larger message here was that body hair was out of fashion.

I was late in picking up on this, as I am on so many things. One day, a friend flippantly asked me if I planned to show up at a summertime social event in a tank top with my “back hair hanging out”. (This person is not a friend anymore, but that’s another story for another time.)

I might have replied that in 1976, my ample body hair would have been considered the height of sexy. But this conversation took place well into the twenty-first century.

I have since succumbed to the manscaping trend. I now keep my back hair in check with a battery-operated device called a Mangroomer. I have become accustomed to having less body hair than I once did, and I’ll pull out the Mangroomer when I start feeling a little shaggy back there.

As far as women’s armpit hair goes: I suppose I’m a prisoner of my early biases. In my formative years, women religiously shaved their armpits but never shaved their privates. Once again, my inclinations and preferences are the exact opposite of twenty-first-century trends.

-ET