The latest trailer for Apple TV’s The Mosquito Coast says it all — it’s obviously been made for ADD idiots who need a lot of noisy gunfire and threats of violence and death to stay interested.

A non-adaptation of Paul Theroux’s 1981 novel about a cranky, hyper genius who despises modern life, the seven-part series premiered last night, although I couldn’t be bothered to watch.

L.A. Times critic Robert Lloyd says “it’s as if someone decided The Catcher in the Rye might be improved by some chase scenes, a gun battle and a jailbreak, and that Holden Caulfield would be a more compelling character if he knew how to use a Coke can to get out of handcuffs.”

“Steel in the Stomach,” posted on 12.3.11

“L’audace, encore de l’audace, tourjours de l’audace!” Did this become an oft-quoted French proverb because Georges Danton said it, or because Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell and General George Patton repeated it? I don’t know the origin of “Who dares, wins…who sweats, wins…who plans, wins” either. Nor do I have any idea who coined the phase “he who hesitates, masturbates.” But they’re all phrases to live by.

Who was the first to use the phrase “four o’clock in the morning courage”? The first time I read it was in Paul Theroux‘s The Mosquito Coast.