I really do like Deadwood on HBO. It’s the only show on TV that makes me really work hard to understand what’s going on because the dialogue is so fucked up; all supposedly true to the way people spoke during that period. Good thing I’m not all sensitive about racial crap though, because they’ve got all manner of racial slurs being slung left and right. Couple that with the Wu character who speaks Chinese even worse than I do (*very* hard to do). But it is really funny to see Al Swearengen trying to communicate with Wu and saying shit like “Joong Gwok… Hing Dai”. And just as I was trying to get over stuff like that, there was an even more unlikely scene in this weekend’s episode. Since George Hearst has decided to stay in the camp a while, he sends for his black slave/cook/servant lady. She arrives in town looking like they fashioned her character after Aunt Jemimah but gave her a slightly more serious air. They go through a few scenes where you see she is a damn good cook and Hearst’s only confidante. Then, out of nowhere, they cut to a scene of her hanging out in the chinks’ part of camp…playing mah jong! She was blabbing all kinds of nonsense which I couldn’t understand, probably akin to the trash talkin we all do when we play MJ. And then came the coup de grace… a tile is discarded, she grabs it, opens her hand… SUP SOM YU! She even called out “Thirteen Orphans, natural!!”. Damn, how funny is that!