the house always wins
Thursday, 15 April 2010 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtStill sinusy, spaced, with cement in my cheekbones and an incipient headache about two feet back from my eyes. Lurking. On the upside, being at home yesterday meant I could supervise (a) the gardener, who continues annoying but at least washed my car, and (b) the house alarm guys, who rewired various sensors disrupted by the renovations, and then cheerfully told me that no, in fact the alarm wasn't working, it can't send a signal to the control room. No, they can't fix it. No, they can't even look at it. The system is too old, they won't repair it, it needs to be replaced. Since the Evil Landlord in fact only arranged for the rewiring after an extended wrestle with the bloody salesman, who is the kind of person who oversells to the point where you don't want to give him any money at all, and who was pushing for us to install a new 20-zone system "in case we want to expand" (to beam sensors in the garden, apparently), I find this curiously suspicious. Rotten swizz, if you ask me.
Also, the particular issue with the alarm failing to communicate means that it keeps innocently trying, thereby knocking out the phone line for 20 minutes and the ADSL for about an hour, or until you reboot the modem, leaving me with no internet for the day as the technicians kept on setting off the alarm in the course of their fiddling. I was, to say the least, narked. Fortunately this is exactly the kind of situation for which the EL's particular brand of Germanic stubbornness is made, and I can just leave him to get on with biting the heads off alarm company droids and burying their bodies in the garden. He's such a comfort to me.
Of course, my Sid-induced absolute lack of brain or initiative means that I've been driven to spend the time by re-watching Castle from the start, since no-one I know yet has the last five or six episodes of the second season and I'm still jonesing for precisely that level of fluff. (Besides, a classic detective plot has a very precise and different pleasure the second time around, as you spot all the clues). This has engendered a certain amount of meditation on the subject of guest actors, their weird recurrences, and that strange form of recognition they cause.
I've obviously now hit a specific sort of threshold where I've watched just enough recent American television to be able to routinely identify minor actors I've seen before. The first five episodes of Castle present the head zombie bad guy from "The Zeppo" playing a meth-head, Supernatural's Agent Victor Henricksen as the friend who helps bury the body plus the kid in "Croatoan" as a spoiled rich brat, Director Brandon from Alias as a corrupt ex-cop private eye, and the haunted lady from "Shadows" (early X-Files), playing a councilman's wife. Later episodes feature Roxy Wasserman from Middleman and a positive plethora of Buffy alumni, including Graham the square-jawed Initiative agent, Riley himself as an amnesiac, and the slightly delectable Principal Wood. The peculiar pleasure of watching TV on the computer is that you can pause the damned thing the instant a familiar face pops up, and head straight to IMDB to ID them accurately instead of having to sit there for the rest of the episode twitching because you can't remember where you've seen them before. (Or is that just me?)
But it does make me think that the guest-acting world must be very small. I don't watch a lot of TV, at least as compared to most non-five-armed-aliens, and they're really starting to pop up now. (And this is quite separate from the tendency of people like Joss and JJ Abrams to re-use actors from one series to another). One factor is, I think, that a bunch of the fantasy/sf TV I watch is apparently made in Vancouver, probably quite a small acting pool, although that doesn't explain all the crossovers with Buffy, filmed in LA. The actors also tend to get really, really typecast, which suggests many of them are types with a fairly limited range. Acting must be a really odd world in which to live and work: some of them have worked for dozens and dozens of series in minor parts. I find myself, possibly as a result of the temperature I was running yesterday, trying to invent LARP scenarios in which feature all the characters played by a single actor. Don't try this at home, kids. Your brain may explode.
Of course, the second side-effect of all this Castle is that I had enjoyably dodgy Nathan Fillion dreams all night, so score.
Also, the particular issue with the alarm failing to communicate means that it keeps innocently trying, thereby knocking out the phone line for 20 minutes and the ADSL for about an hour, or until you reboot the modem, leaving me with no internet for the day as the technicians kept on setting off the alarm in the course of their fiddling. I was, to say the least, narked. Fortunately this is exactly the kind of situation for which the EL's particular brand of Germanic stubbornness is made, and I can just leave him to get on with biting the heads off alarm company droids and burying their bodies in the garden. He's such a comfort to me.
Of course, my Sid-induced absolute lack of brain or initiative means that I've been driven to spend the time by re-watching Castle from the start, since no-one I know yet has the last five or six episodes of the second season and I'm still jonesing for precisely that level of fluff. (Besides, a classic detective plot has a very precise and different pleasure the second time around, as you spot all the clues). This has engendered a certain amount of meditation on the subject of guest actors, their weird recurrences, and that strange form of recognition they cause.
I've obviously now hit a specific sort of threshold where I've watched just enough recent American television to be able to routinely identify minor actors I've seen before. The first five episodes of Castle present the head zombie bad guy from "The Zeppo" playing a meth-head, Supernatural's Agent Victor Henricksen as the friend who helps bury the body plus the kid in "Croatoan" as a spoiled rich brat, Director Brandon from Alias as a corrupt ex-cop private eye, and the haunted lady from "Shadows" (early X-Files), playing a councilman's wife. Later episodes feature Roxy Wasserman from Middleman and a positive plethora of Buffy alumni, including Graham the square-jawed Initiative agent, Riley himself as an amnesiac, and the slightly delectable Principal Wood. The peculiar pleasure of watching TV on the computer is that you can pause the damned thing the instant a familiar face pops up, and head straight to IMDB to ID them accurately instead of having to sit there for the rest of the episode twitching because you can't remember where you've seen them before. (Or is that just me?)
But it does make me think that the guest-acting world must be very small. I don't watch a lot of TV, at least as compared to most non-five-armed-aliens, and they're really starting to pop up now. (And this is quite separate from the tendency of people like Joss and JJ Abrams to re-use actors from one series to another). One factor is, I think, that a bunch of the fantasy/sf TV I watch is apparently made in Vancouver, probably quite a small acting pool, although that doesn't explain all the crossovers with Buffy, filmed in LA. The actors also tend to get really, really typecast, which suggests many of them are types with a fairly limited range. Acting must be a really odd world in which to live and work: some of them have worked for dozens and dozens of series in minor parts. I find myself, possibly as a result of the temperature I was running yesterday, trying to invent LARP scenarios in which feature all the characters played by a single actor. Don't try this at home, kids. Your brain may explode.
Of course, the second side-effect of all this Castle is that I had enjoyably dodgy Nathan Fillion dreams all night, so score.
no subject
Date: Thursday, 15 April 2010 05:24 pm (UTC)Yay! for Nathan Filion dreams! A few nights ago I dreamed about him naked. :-)
Also? Come here for Halloween. I know the block of the street he lives on, and I'm told he dresses up to give out candy, so this year I'm borrowing a child and trick-or-treating in that neighborhood. ;-)
Cheers, Dayle