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With Linda still out at the TCA gathering, TV is much on our minds. And as she noted yesterday, there's a whole big conversation going on about the newer modes of consuming what we still, for lack of a better word, generally call television.

(Actually, we probably don't need a better word, as "television" just means "far-sight" and doesn't have anything to do with broadcast or spectrum or modes of transmission or the technology involved, BUT I DIGRESS.)

One current case in point: Jack Irish, an Australian series based on the novels by Peter Temple, starring Guy Pearce. It's been aired by traditional broadcast in Oz, but here in the U.S. it's being offered digitally by Acorn TV, either as a Netflix-style stream on its website or via Roku and such. (For older-school types who'd still like to binge-watch it, it'll be out on DVD and Blu-ray in October.)

The series gets underway with a flashback in which an aggrieved former client visits Jack — a successful criminal attorney in Melbourne — to vent his unhappiness about the outcome of a case. It's an office confrontation of the sort that many shows would (and do) play for black comedy, but for Jack, it's a brutal life-changer. Once the opening credits have rolled, he's chucked his practice and is earning a living as a debt collector, and not in the nicer neighborhoods.

Pearce joins NPR's Linda Wertheimer on this Saturday's Weekend Edition to talk about the series, the Fitzroy district that gives the series its setting, and what the actor has in common with his character. Among the things we learn:

* Jack may have hit the bottom of the bottle he fell into after that office incident — or he may not have. He's "kind of coming out of that haze, and really trying to get his life back together, but he's obviously still quite wobbly, shall we say. He still drinks, but really knows it's time for him to sort himself out."

* The role of the series' Greek chorus is taken by a trio of veteran character actors with "a combined age of 240," who play a gang of bar regulars Jack likes to call the Fitzroy Youth Club. They hang at the local and watch Australian football, rooting for the Fitzroy team — which, and here's the thing, folded as a pro operation some years ago. So they're watching videotapes. "They still live it as if it exists," Pearce says. Oh, and Jack's dad used to play for the team, so he's their pet.

* Like Jack, Pearce lost his dad, a test pilot, when he was young. He tells Wertheimer that one way he found his way into the character was thinking about how, "throughout your life ... you keep projecting father-figuredom onto various men that come into your life. And sometimes that's a good choice, and sometimes that's a bad choice."

When you listen to the whole conversation, which you should do for The Guy Pearce Accent alone, you'll hear more about which Jack Irish character turns out to be a solid influence, how the hero uses a hands-on hobby to decompress, and what makes the series "quintessentially Australian." Just hit the play button above.

Those who hope, as I did, to trace Lin-Liu's noodle quest in one long, shining, unbroken strand will be disappointed. Lin-Liu travels through rice country (China and Iran) and bread country (everywhere else), and finds noodles relegated to secondary or zero status. Like all those who follow roads not knowing whether they lead to Oz or perdition, she must wrestle with whatever answer comes. It's an awkward predicament, and it ties Lin-Liu in knots: "Maybe noodles and filled pasta had taken a roundabout tour of the Middle East and North Africa on their journey to Italy. Or perhaps ... culinary exchanges had taken place between the Italian peninsula and Asia Minor. Or perhaps, it was a coincidence? After seven thousand miles, the connection was still a mystery."

The Salt

From Ramen To Rotini: Following The Noodles Of The Silk Road

The Thai Elephant Orchestra is, remarkably, just what it sounds like. At a conservation center in Thailand, made for former work animals with nowhere to go, a group of elephants has been assembled and trained to play enormous percussion instruments, holding mallets in their trunks and sometimes trumpeting along.

David Sulzer — known in the music world as Dave Soldier — is a neuroscientist at Columbia University, a composer and the co-founder of the orchestra.

"Elephants like to listen to music: If you play music they'll come over, and in the morning when the mahouts take them out of the jungle, they sing to to calm them down," Sulzer tells NPR's Jacki Lyden. "So what we came up with was, well, maybe if we made ergonomic instruments that would be easy for elephants to play — for instance, marimbas and drums that are giant — perhaps they would play music."

Among those instruments is a sort of oversized xylophone that Sulzer built in a metal shop in Lampang, using the music he heard locally as a guide.

A botched attack on an Indian consulate in Afghanistan's eastern city of Jalalabad has nine civilians dead in addition to the three suicide bombers, security officials say.

NPR's Sean Carberry reports from Kabul that the Taliban has disclaimed responsibility for the bombing in which two-dozen people were also wounded.

Sean says the explosion occurred outside the consulate but that most of the victims were at a neighboring mosque. Two other attackers died in a gun battle with security forces.

The BBC says the three bombers drove up in a car before detonating their explosives. It was unclear if the other two assailants were in the same car:

"Deputy police chief of Nangarhar province Masum Khan Hashimi said the blast, close to a mosque, had been a failed attempt to attack the Indian consulate.

He said two of the attackers wearing vests laden with explosives got out of the car and

The remaining occupant of the car then blew it up, he told Reuters news agency."