freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with tv

The writers of headlines for the Daily Voice billboards cause me much innocent, or occasionally scurrilous, joy. I have realised, after several seconds of mature reflection, that it's not just their propensity for linguistic games, it's also the fact that they clearly have a severely warped sense of humour and absolutely no social inhibitions whatsoever, and are thus far more My Tribe than I would expect to find attached to a low-class tabloid rag. Today's little gem:

TEARS AFTER ONION MURDER!

I have no idea why it's an onion murder - someone was bashed to death with a bag of onions? in a field of onions? while reading The Onion? maybe an innocent onion was ruthlessly slaughtered? either way, I laughed all the way home.

I am, of course, at home today, which is just as well, since I'm feeling like hell again - sinus trying to resurge into full-blown 'flu, glands all up and stuff. Phooey. However, am fortified against the pile of credit transfers which face me by two evenings of new Castle behind me, and tonight's planned two new episodes of Fringe ahead.

I also watched "The Beast Below", which is the latest Doctor Who episode, but the jury is still out on the current series. I am inclining very quickly towards thinking that the new Doctor is bloody well cast, he's producing a very nice blend of quirk, authority and charm, and taking in his stride the difficult task of providing a Tennant replacement when the Tennant bar was set so high. The episodes themselves, thought, while they're not causing Davies-style continuity rage, are also not producing the requisite degree of fangirly contentment on the narrative level. They're ... OK. "The Beast Below" was vaguely interesting, vaguely logical, vaguely worked. Vaguely. It just didn't cause me the deep narrative satisfaction of "Blink" or "The Girl in the Fireplace", and I am forced to face the possibility that Moffat may have his off days, or may be diluting himself too far. I am not yet losing hope, but I can't quite commit to this relationship for fear of being hurt.

On the other hand, the one-liners are still good.

Current Mood: tired, glandy
Current Music: David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust

Still 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.

Current Mood: a bit vague
Current Music: OK Go, Oh No

I seem to have a Seekrit Network of agents who supply me with the new TV I want to watch, in some cases unasked, as in

mac1235 arriving randomly on Friday night with the first of the Matt Smith Doctor Who episodes. This is a slightly odd situation for me to find myself in, given my ongoing ethical problems with the idea of watching ripped copies: I still have to subdue the raging guilt with the knowledge that I will acquire the DVDs of these things when they come out - the rule is, if I watch more than an episode or so of something, I have to buy it, and I do. My giant DVD collection and shattered credit card will, of course, be an absolutely ineffective plea when the jack-booted fascists of the New World Order kick my door down on a piracy charge, but at least I'll be dragged off while still in possession of the moral high ground.

So, the new Doctor. Hmmm.

I absolutely do not like the new logo or Tardis tunnels, or the new arrangement of the theme music.
On the other hand, the simple words "By Stephen Moffat" on the screen fill me with security and peaceful expectation. "By Russell T. Davies" used to make me tense up and cower slightly in anticipation of the hurtling plot holes.
Cute little girl. I do like strong-minded small children. And the Doctor's interactions with her over the whole Tigger-like food-testing were rather endearing.
The unfolding of the plot gave me what I can only describe as the Anti-Davies experience, in that I kept recognising tiny throw-away bits of dialogue which tied the whole thing together and made events make sense. It wasn't a vintage Moffat plot, but it was a solid one, with the hallmarks of logic, coherence, a reasonable degree of underlying elegance, and the actual weaving-in of time travel as intrinsic to events.
I'm impressed by how quickly the new Doctor establishes himself as a presence and a personality in his own right. There's a lovely balance of continuity with the Tennant quirks and novelty in the whole new bunch of his own. I have a dark suspicion that this is a clever actor, although I think he's also well supported by a clever script. Clever scripting causes me fangirly swooning. I also like the way he's being set up as having a forceful, slightly threatening edge, which was there in the last Doctor but slightly obscured by the Tennant Well-Bred Field-Mouse Effect.
I am not grovelling in instant fangirl adoration at the Eleventh Doctor's feet, my heart still belongs to the Tenth, but he isn't annoying me as much as I was afraid he would. I still feel the actor is a bit young, but actually the way he's playing it, possibly in tandem with the slightly odd shape of his face, makes him come across as rather ageless. (Is it just me, or is his head shaped like a peanut?).

All in all I'm open to allowing him to grow on me. As did, in fact, David Tennant, in the teeth of my fondness for the Ecclestone version. Possibly I should just trust to Stephen Moffat, or to the ineffable charms of the Doctor archetype. Or to my own propensities, which encourage me to invest utterly in these things if they give me half a chance. Sigh.

Current Mood: judicious, well disposed
Current Music: Magnetic Fields, Distortion.

Oh, dear. I tried, really I did. Several of you whose taste I esteem have been raving about Big Bang Theory, and in my plaintive and temporary Castle hiatus I hauled out the first couple of episodes last night and gave them a try. It's not the first time I've sampled the series: I lasted about four minutes into the pilot several months ago. This time I gave it fifteen minutes, then I uncurled myself from my foetal ball of pain and randomly sampled through bits of the next few episodes in the vague hope that it Got Better.

Um, nope. Still a newt. This is embarrassment humour. It's badly overdrawn, which I admit worked for The Middleman but doesn't work for me here. It has a laugh track. It's so not for me. I can't get through the embarrassment enough to access all the geeky references which I am perfectly willing to admit are there, adding intelligence and layering and complexity and what have you. I'm not even able to hang on in the hopes of seeing the Wil Wheaton guest appearance in context, although Wil Wheaton being a bastard in The Guild seriously grooved my ploons. I fear that Big Bang Theory and I have parted, as they say, brass rags. (Which, by the Mysterious Power of Google, I now discover is yet another of those weird idioms which comes from 19th-century sailing ships, although I cannot tell a lie, I got it from P. G. Wodehouse).

On the upside, scientific pollage reveals that

smoczek's unaccountable fondness for soggy waffles is a personal aberration, not a cultural trend of which I was ignorant. Fans of Big Bang Theory are kindly to place my lack of enjoyment of the series under the "soggy waffle" heading and forgive me my sins as I do Jo's.

Current Mood: saddened

One of the things I inherited from my dad was the family clock, an old wooden one like a small, sturdy wooden house with a minimalist outbreak of carving and gold leaf. It dates from about 1910 and belonged, I think, to my grandparents: it has a Westminster chime which was forever getting out of sync, and with which I remember my father endlessly tinkering, like the Duke of Coffin Castle, to try and persuade its dings to mesh with its dongs. So to speak. When I inherited it it had travelled all over Zimbabwe, up to France and then down again to Cape Town, and was very firmly Not Working. However, by one of those wonderful fortuities

friendly_shrink's father is a clockmaker specialising in old clocks, and he very kindly restored the workings for me at a fraction of the usual price for such things. This was particularly kind as it was apparently a total bugger, causing him to have to rootle endlessly around its innards, presumably with strange Germanic clockmaker's oaths, and to actually machine new parts for the gaps in its rather shoddy workings. (Don't, apparently, go for German clock parts, they're not as good as the French or Swiss.)

Now it's on the piano, gently chiming the quarter hours, and every time I wander through the living room and catch it in mid-chime, I have to swallow this enormous lump in my throat. That sound is part of my childhood: the clock stood on the mantelpiece in our house in Harare when I was in high school, between the two foot porcelain dandy peering coyly around the muchly rose-bedewed fencepost, and the gap where his frothy-petticoated shepherdess sweetheart stood before the cat knocked her down and shattered her into fifty million porcelain bits. (And good riddance. I hated those things, they were perfect examples of Rococo Twee). The clock, though: the clock is memory and evocation, and a familiar household god, and it somehow makes the house slightly more fundamentally home to have it anchored by that gentle soundtrack. Even if I am now forced to add it to the ever-increasing list of the Approximately Three Million Random Things That Make Me Cry.

Things That Make Me Giggle, however: Castle. Castle is jolly detective romance TV: it's the froth on your cappuccino, the flourish to your hat, the cheerful solid child-friendly blocks from which your narrative is built. It's gosh-darned perky, composed mainly of one-liners, good humour and perfectly obvious twists. It works mostly because Nathan Fillion could put across the debonair bastard with the heart of gold with the mere power of his eyebrows while reading from the telephone directory. It's worth watching for Castle's relationship with his daughter alone, but I am developing a fondness not unakin to horrified fascination for the opening corpse montages with the pretentious photography and the nice indie soundtrack. I am unable to acquit them of taking the mickey out of themselves. I finished the first season in a giant, glorious gobble as a distraction from my current state of sinus headache, and am possessing my soul in patience until the second season finishes on Monday and I can extract it from long-suffering friends. It's no bloody good at all, but it makes me happy.

Current Mood: sleepy, sinusy, Sidded

The last three weeks have been pretty much a dead loss, productivity-wise: I thought I was going through an epic dose of god-I-hate-this-job, but actually I think it's just stress, or possibly even grief. Stress apparently makes me vague, dissociated and subject to quite unreasonable levels of memory failure, which means that I've sat at my desk frittering away the time on actually I'm not sure what. This is quite apart from disruptions for wrapping up my dad's effects, a dose of sinus infection, the overseeing of various artisans for post-army-of-reconstruction reconstructions, and various doctor's appointments and tests. (The darned breast cyst filled up again and had to be re-syringed: it's currently violently bruised in a highly concentrated area, as though I've been punched smartly in the left boob by something very small, very focused and very intensely angry - I'm thinking an Oompa-Loompa version of the Hulk). This week has been further disrupted by panic and the visiting of my sister in hospital, but she's much better, visibly improving - thank you to everyone for their good wishes and reassuring anecdotes.

Memory loss can, however, work in your favour. Today I had to take Golux back to the vet for her second nose-freezing appointment. (Me to vet, wearily: "Have a box of complaint.") I am wise to Golux now: I grabbed her first go without having to chase her round the house, by dint of completely forgetting about the appointment until I tried to open the door to the cat-food cupboard and found the notice reading "DON'T FEED THE CATS!" which I cunningly left there for the Evil Landlord last night, and then promptly forgot about. Since there was about a nanosecond between me remembering and me grabbing her, with a concomitant lack of time for body language changes, it was all fairly painless, if more than somewhat Zen. I am also amused to note that she spends the trip to the vet lying peaceably on the floor of the catbox with her paws curled in, looking perfectly calm except for the ongoing yowling, which I am thus forced to conclude is more for my benefit than being about genuine distress.

Today's happy serendipity: an entertaining 20-minute discussion with my Masters student, who is writing on Frankenstein but hesitantly confessed in passing a geeky and shamefaced love for both Supernatural and Fringe. Foolish woman! An explosion of mutual fangirling later, we'd done a fairly solid deconstruction of Fringe's mad-scientist archetypes, and explored my off-the-cuff thesis that Walter is both Frankenstein (narcissistic genius unable to deal with consequences of his transgressive science) and monster (fragmented, damaged and trying to construct himself). Sadly, she reveals herself as a Dean girl, which means I shall have to scrutinise her writing extra-narrowly for flaws of insight. (I still skew Sam, although you could probably also describe me as Dean-curious). We were also able to subject Supernatural's Christian mythology to a searching analysis which found parallels with Shelley's critique of Milton, but I doubt you want to go there.

It's possibly the case that academics shouldn't also be fangirls. Under the spur of enthusiasm the verbiage gets particularly dense.

Current Mood: vague

I love my kitties. Really I do. Even after I've arrived at work an hour late after spending twenty-five minutes chasing Golux around the house so I can put her into a catbox to take her to the vet¹. She has amazingly good radar for "opposable thumb thing person about to grab me and stuff me into a catbox", only slightly less microscopically sensitive than her radar for "opposable thumb thing person about to grab me and anoint me with smelly anti-flea stuff." She'll be two feet away, demanding breakfast, until you even think about grabbing her, at which point she presumably picks up the minute change in your body language and wafts away and hides. I am currently Public Enemy Number One in the Lexicon of Golux: she whinged non-stop all the way to the vet, that deep-chested part-Siamese yowl, and death-glared me until I left. I'm not feeling guilty by dint of constant effort.

Hobbit, on the other hand, has decided that me watching Fringe on my computer equates to me offering him inadequate attention. His solution, as of last night:

At precisely the point where the giant irascible genetically-modified multi-creature with the stinger and huge fangs was leaping out from behind trees at people, he precipitated himself off the desk onto my lap in a frenzy of affection and proceeded to bite my arm lovingly, purring like a Harley. Then he fell off, embedding his claws into my leg on the way down.

I love my kitties. Really I do. In an affectionately homicidal sort of way.

¹ She has a pink nose, which gets sunburned and develops cancerous ulcer thingies, which means about once a year I have to take her in to have the spots frozen off in a 4-part series of weekly treatments, which seems to be keeping the serious cancer at bay. This wouldn't happen if she didn't spend so much time sleeping in the sun. I've seriously considered covering the entire house in a giant umbrella, but I have enough difficulty growing things under the plane tree. Also, if she was difficult to catch this time, imagine what she'll be like by Week 4. *shudder*

Current Mood: Loving. With gritted teeth.
Current Music: Fleetwood Mac

Oh, dear, I've discovered Fringe. I'm beginning to think that a misspent youth dallying with Sayers, Allingham and Marsh has actually imprinted me heavily on the investigative genre: give me detectives, private eyes, FBI agents, I'm happy. (Memo to self, break out Castle). From quite another angle, also give me grandiose paranormal paranoid conspiracy theories and I'm ecstatic. This means that I intersect with J J Abrams far more than is probably healthy, insofar as I have a completely unrepentant addiction to Alias, although mercifully I never bought into Lost. So far Fringe isn't throwing aliens around, but otherwise it's an unashamed X-Files rip-off; my happy triumvirate of pseudo-scientific paranormal investigation is now (a) X-Files, (b) Fringe, and (c) Shadow Unit. (Supernatural, Buffy/Angel and The Middleman, of course, fill the equal and opposite mystical paranormal investigation slots).

Fringe isn't brilliant, and it certainly isn't original, but it's kinda cute. Points in its favour: Joshua Jackson (endearing), Denethor (John Noble does a good mad), nice line in mystic mumbo-jumbo ("the Pattern"). Points not in its favour: predictable, done, occasionally icky (I'm not big on exploding heads) and six episodes in the bad guys seem prone to repetition. I'm also not madly taking to the slightly brittle female lead, although I'm willing to concede she has pretty hair. Bonus points: cow in the basement lab, tendency to one-liners, occasional outbreaks of piano-playing. Also, the bogus science is entertainingly bogus, but actually pays slightly more lip-service to rational logic than poor old Spooky ever did.

I'm finding myself wondering, though. These paranoid-conspiracy-pandering TV shows seem to generate enough of an audience to engender new variations every few years. Do you think this is because people actually want to believe this stuff? Because, eeeuw. As a Sturdy Rationalist I classify both detective fiction and paranormal-conspiracy firmly under "fantasy", the former because of its narrative structure, the latter because of its content. I like fantasy. I like it because it's fantastic. The world doesn't work like that, but it's fun to imagine what it would be like if it did. I'm hoping the audience for these shows enjoys them as hokum in the same way that I do, rather than leaping up to shout "I knew it!" every ten minutes. However, I look at the human tendency to latch onto the pure hokum disseminated by the religious right, tabloid reporting, advertising, corporate spin doctors and random passers-by, and I'm not sanguine.

Further fascinating thought for the day: do you think that if we strapped J J Abrams and Russell Davies down in a basement lab somewhere and scientifically crossed each of them individually with stolen DNA from Stephen Moffat, we'd get interesting stories that actually held together instead of falling apart at the moment of narrative crux? I can't help thinking it might be worth a try.

Current Mood: apathetic
Current Music: New Model Army, Thunder and Consolation

How much do I loathe Russell T. Davies? Well, actually, I don't, he's always come across as a rather sweet and inoffensive man in interviews, and we of the fangirly persuasion owe him oodles for his resuscitation of the Doctor Who franchise. But, ye gods and little poodles, he does the most horrible things to narrative. I finally dug up the gumption to watch the Tenth Doctor's exit last night, and I'm still picking bits of it out of my teeth. I adore the Tenth Doctor. He's a doll. He's also a damned fine actor, and deserves infinitely better than the illogical pap served up to him in the name of plot. ( Further fulminations cut in the interests of spoilerage. )

Anyway. Thanks, Russell T. Davies. On balance we were probably lucky to have you and I hope you go on to even better things, but I do not grok your personal narrative beliefs, nor wish them well. Above all, stay away from time travel. You don't get it.

Current Mood: not as annoyed as I thought

Right, well, then. That seems to be it: the official length of contiguous time during which I can handle the degree of stress occasioned by orientation and registration in evil-minded tandem is, in fact, four and a half days. At around lunchtime, when yet another crisis reared its ugly head, there was a sort of audible snapping noise in the key of F#, and I gave up. Cancelled the activity. Ignored OL meeps of complaint. Made unilateral decision to save self, and all else concerned, additional stress, and simply opted out. It was a silly part of the programme anyway, and I was planning to ditch it next year come what may. I am become ruthless in the pursuit of my own sanity, which incidentally was materially assisted in the last two days by (a) random chocolate from

wolverine_nun and (b) random chocolate from

herne_kzn. I am now hermitted in my office with the door locked, defiantly blogging, and let the rest of the bloody programme go hang.

My sanity is also being materially assisted not only by the haven of the jo&stv abode, but by Supernatural. The above image of an evil-minded tandem has irresistibly recalled the particularly goofy Season 5 episode I just watched, which features whole chunks of Sam & Dean mugging for the camera in a sort of 50s zany sitcom setting, including above-mentioned bicycle made for two. David M complains that whenever the Supernatural writers run out of ideas they fling in a meta episode. My known proclivities in the direction of narrative self-consciousness being what they are, I acknowledge the justice of his statement and joyously celebrate its truth. The meta episodes tickle me no end. The convention one cracked me up completely. This series is actually beautifully layered.

I am led to believe, via my daily ELB (Evil Landlord Bulletin), that the house is currently without a functioning toilet bar the smelly chemical toilet near the gate, and will moreover be without water for several days while plumbers plumb merrily. I clutch my temporary haven close to my chest in devout thankfulness, and shudder.

Current Mood: defiant, frayed
Current Music: 500 Days of Summer soundtrack

Much movie-watching to start the new year! I consider this to be a good omen. Of course, much movie-watching has also resulted because I've finished watching Season 4 of Supernatural, woe is me, and will have to possess my soul in patience (as befits the subject matter) until Season 5 finishes and gets its (cute) butt onto DVD. Season 4 was ... dark. Very dark and angsty, and featured angsty boys being dingbats and being led around by the nose by both angels and demons while apocalypse lowered. Given how absolutely steeped in Christian mythology the whole series is, I'm surprised I'm enjoying it as much as I am. On the other hand, the writers really are throwing their hats into the ring on the whole "Judao-Christian notions of God lack all sense or logic" issue, which is probably helping.

Anyway. This weekend I watched two movies: Brick, on DVD last night, about which I say wow, and Sherlock Holmes on circuit this morning, about which I say yay. ( Reviews follow. Spoilery. You Have Been Warned. )

This week: Avatar! alias Thundersmurfs!. And probably 500 Days of Summer, just to show the world that I do too have a brain.

Current Mood: analytic, fangirly

It has become traditional to do that thing where you mark the end of the year by running together the first sentence of your first post from every month, resulting in pleasingly surreal and surprisingly representative dadaist gibberish. Thusly:

I have to report quite the nicest new year wish I've had so far. Hello, February, who the hell let you in? Oo, er. Arrived safely in France. I love the bit where I tell a room full of anxious first-years that it's actually significantly difficult to get thrown out of the faculty, they're fine if they pass three courses in their first year. I was going to review Wolverine, honestly I was. Back at work, alas. Hooray, my dreams are back! Wheee! new words! Good grief, it's October. Gawsh. Oh, happy day!

Doing my mystic gypsy bit, I divine the following about 2009:

I still habitually start months with surprised exclamations.
France loomed large in the year.
I still enjoy the bit where I make students' lives better.
Other than that I hate my job.
Disappointing year for Hollywood popcorn movies. (Yes, I didn't like Star Trek either.)
Still get high on words.
For a year which really presented hitherto-unsuspected magnitudes of suck, I actually sound quite determinedly upbeat. That, or extremely sarcastic.

Today, in wanton retreat from all the orientation material I've been updating, I played Zelda in short, compensatory bursts in between packing up the booze cabinet so the Evil Landlord's sister could spirit it away. This necessitated rearranging (and incidentally New Year-cleaning) the kitchen to fit in all the cabinet contents, and thereafter constructing a map so the Evil Landlord could find it all again, although I admit it might have been more amusing to let him bumble around for ever before discovering that all the tall booze is now stashed in with the catfood.

The Zelda thing has re-started after a two-week hiatus after I had to call in stv as a consultant to get me through the horrible bit of the fire temple where I kept falling off the curving ramp trying to run it before the time limit, which he humiliated me utterly by doing first go, without touching the sides. In revenge I have subsequently kicked the butts of the bosses for both the fire and water temples, first go without touching the sides, and in the last one without even using up my healing potions. Currently hung up on trying to catch sufficiently large fish: got annoyed, watched more Supernatural, which (towards the end of Season 4) is extremely angsty and in which angels are bastards and Sam is being a dingbat. On the upside, meta episode is meta. In-episode slash references make me strangely happy.

I'm going to bed now, I seem to be babbling.

Current Mood: slightly unhinged

Gawsh, still happy. The approaching holiday must be doing its thing. Today I am gladdened by:

Rain! It's raining! gentle, soft, completely unseasonal summer rain which is making things misty and slightly cool, but not cold. Of course, this is further evidence of climate change and what have you, and we're all screwed, but I'm happily damp.
Improv Everywhere. They're kind of the Non-Evil Twin of candid camera: do weird, wacky stuff that makes people unexpectedly and laterally happy.
Chicken pot pie. I pretty much forgot to eat yesterday, besides the brownies, so wandered home and made chicken pot pie for supper. It's comfort food. Also, a really nice recipe with leeks and gammon in a creamy sauce flavoured with lemon and mustard. Happily unhealthy.
Supernatural motel décor. I swear, those boys scour America for the most trippy, psychedelic, catastrophically ugly motel rooms imaginable by man or demon. The set designers must have a blast creating them. I'd do a list, but the mad fansites beat me to it. Some of them have truly awful themes - the orange/bullfighter one and the black and silver disco one crack me up. Happily.
Last day at work! Despite the fact that I'm going to have to spend part of the next two weeks working on Orientation material, Holiday! holidayholidayholiday! Happy!

Current Mood: determinedly upbeat

So, totally buggered at the moment, but in fact surprisingly upbeat despite all the orientation panic, student angst and what have you. An anti-rant-list is apparently called for. Today, the following things are making me happy:

Holidays. Yesterday was a public holiday, for which I thank the saints fasting. I'm in that stage of mental shut-down which says that energy-wise I'm pretty much at the end of my tether - I did sweet bugger-all all day yesterday, it was luvverly. I have two weeks off from Friday, which is a half day owing to the staff party. I figure I'll just about survive, having carefully paced myself to this point.
Chocolate brownies. For my birthday this year sven&tanya gave me this incredible book called Chocolate Chocolate, full of recipes which require untold and unlikely quantities of the eponymous ingredient, and which are uniformly and unashamedly decadent and bad for you. (Eighteen different chocolate brownie recipes! good grief!) As a result of this I've actually learned to make decent brownies, which has mostly been a matter of subtracting 50^o from the temperature, fifteen minutes from the cooking time, and flinging into the recipe whatever the hell happens to occur to me in the way of extra chocolate, extra Lindt dark chocolate, extra cocoa, extra chocolate chips, extra vanilla, or extra random nuts or flavourings. The last batch was exceptionally edible, and I have three of them in a tin on my desk. The morning will be somewhat sugar-powered in addition to its usual Earl Grey fuel.
Recession. Yes, really. No-one has any money, everyone is doing the "ooh let's not do big presents this year!" thing, the shops are comparatively empty, and consequently Christmas is not bringing out my inner homicidal misanthrope quite as much as it usually does.
Supernatural. Season three is both darker and goofier (rabbit's-foot physical humour ftw), angsty!boys are angstier, but mostly I'm happy because last night's episode about fairy tale got the fairy tale bit absolutely right. Bonus accurate "Grimms' fairy tales were dark, twisty, violent and sexy" references from Sam, my current favourite geek in the whole wide world. Also, pleasingly perverse Christmas episode featuring caricatured 50s-style cheery suburban couples with a charnel house in the cellar.
My mother. She's in town. Life is better.
Cthulhoid wossnames. My Tor.com mailing list signup just gave me a totally unexpected early gift of the new Charlie Stross Laundry story, also with additional Cthulhoid Christmas perversion (the Filler of Stockings!). It'll go up on Tor.com next week, but if anyone really wants to read it earlier, mail me!
First trailer for Iron Man 2. 'Nuff said.

Now I go to herd academics, hand-hold devastated students and wrangle orientation photocopying. I wave a chocolate brownie mystically at them all.

Current Mood: surprisingly upbeat
Current Music: SL compilations

Exchanging emails with one of my orientation leaders for next year: his mail programme is rather entertainingly mangling my original message when it quotes it, ending up with beautifully nonsensical strings. This morning's read "2010 wounehowesour third -howile youyouhavelare good and havere trainedplanneOLyournehowesif I shoOLThabshowk you tyouhavelown", which I promise was reasonably coherent English when I sent it. The extent to which this is amusing me is probably indicative of how stressful this week has been. Seven or eight excluded students per day. There's a high-water-mark of trauma at about chest height in my office, and my Japanese Peace Lily is drooping. Sigh.

On the upside, the chocolate biscuit supply is holding out, and tomorrow is a public holiday, which I have resolved to spend watching movies, making nucato with

wolverine_nun and finishing up the Season 2 finale of Supernatural. The one with the djinn last night was slightly heartbreaking. Angsty boys! boys with angst! I keep threatening to make that correspondence chart matching Supernatural episodes with the ones they've ripped off from X-Files, in this case "Amor Fati" from Season 6. There are apparently no new plots in the world.

My adorable Hobbit is apparently an adorable psycho killer, he brought in a loudly-meeping baby bird yesterday and refused to give it up, responding to all attempts with a deeply worrying Harley Davidson growl from his manly ex-tomcat chest. Fortunately he killed it fairly quickly. The high winds over the weekend have apparently brought baby birds down from nests all over, there was another one on campus yesterday, which the university's feral cat population have presumably dealt with posthaste. There's bloody well nothing you can do for baby birds: can't put them back, can't rescue them without traumatising them beyond recovery, they're pretty much doomed to die, which, as Pterry notes, "is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds." Again with the sigh. I think I'll have a chocolate biscuit now.

Current Mood: tired, angsted out
Current Music: Section Quartet covering the Strokes

Heigh, ho. Yet-another-unsuccessful-lectureship-application last week has induced the usual despair and angst, leading to a vale of tears and self-loathing, a retreat into Supernatural and sewing, and really boring blog posts, for which I apologise. In an effort both at distraction and actual interest, have some Monday morning linkery.

Completely incredible Bioshock cosplay, photographed at an aquarium. Now I want to play Bioshock again. Memo to self, make Evil Landlord buy the sequel when it comes out, possibly by repeat application of creme caramel.
We don't often get to hear about this side of the abortion/adoption debate. Reading this is making me slightly ashamed of even thinking casually about adoption as an issue; it's also engendering the usual feminist rage about patriarchal control of female reproduction and the incredible powerlessness of so many women in this situation. Also, now I like Juno a lot less.

In other, less depressing news, Hobbit has a new trick, viz. lurking under the giant leaves of the delicious monster on the edge of the patio, and ambushing your ankles as you walk past. Fortunately he still hasn't got the hang of this strange "skirt" concept, and tends to suddenly veer off and look embarrassed at the last minute instead of actually connecting with my ankles.

Also, halfway through Season 2 of Supernatural, and am I imagining it, or is the writing suddenly on an upswing? I'm a bit over-emotional at the moment anyway, but "Houses of the Holy", "Born Under a Bad Sign", "Roadkill" and "Heart" were a series of gut-punches which did wonderful things with the emotional arc of the season, and also didn't go quite where narrative cliché dictated they should. ("Tall Tales" was also bloody good fun, and the slow-dancing alien made me laugh a great deal). Also, this show works as a Necessary Perspective Vortex: no matter how annoying my life is, at least I don't have to deal with demon possession, a life based on credit card fraud and running from the police, and the ongoing possibility of having to kill someone I love.

Current Mood: bleah

Today's amusing billboard: LEE-ANN SNOGS A BOYTJIE!! I don't know who the hell Lee-Ann is, but I'm very amused by the language choice of the headline. For a start, "snog" is unabashed Brit slang while "boytjie" is very much a South-Africanism; the wide lexical range creates a sort of airy, unresolved bounce between contexts. The use of the diminutive (often an endearment) is playful, denoting an affectionate intimacy with Lee-Ann, but it also diminishes the significance of the partner, clearly a negligible quantity, to allow the focus to remain firmly on Lee-Ann herself (whoever the hell she is). More than this, the language (and multiple exclamation points) contributes to the mere fact of the billboard to suggest, on the "man bites dog" principle, that it's somehow outrageous for Lee-Ann (whoever the hell she is) to snog a boy: I was left with a vague suspicion that she's actually a lesbian. Alternatively, the "boytjie" bit could also imply that she's an older woman shamelessly grabbing a much younger man.

A quick google, of course, absolutely deflates this lovely tension and implication: Lee-Ann is presumably Lee-Ann Liebenberg, a fairly minor South African model/celebrity, and she's found a new boyfriend indecently quickly after a break-up. This is one of those stories where the subject matter is infinitely less interesting than the linguistic play in its headline. Sigh.

In other news, have found the solution to Supernatural freaking me the hell out. Knitting. Another twelve rows on the Ravenclaw scarf while flinching away from ghosts, demons and hellhounds. Still a Sam girl, but Dean is growing on me.

Current Mood: possibly already asleep

Memo to self: it's possibly counter-productive to watch Supernatural at night when I'm alone in the house (the Evil Landlord being off at Here Be Dragons), as at a generous estimate I only see about 70% of any one episode, owing to being too scared to look at the screen. The creepy build-up music does it for me every time. This is also causing me to remember that in fact I only used to be able to watch X-Files, back in the day when it was on TV, by dint of importing

bumpycat to come and hold my hand every Friday night. I am an enormous wuss. Next plan: watch Supernatural from the other side of the room while filing bills.

On the upside, Sam is cute. On the further upside, Cape Town weather continues bizarre - it's bucketing with rain, and there are branches down all over the garden from the high winds. I am a happy bunny, albeit a quivering, wild-eyed happy bunny convinced there's something under my bed. The main problem is that there often is something under my bed, on account of how Golux likes to go and fossick around in there, among the boxes of role-playing dreck and the small, feral herds of straying boots, making interesting bumping noises in the night. It's probably all good for the moral fibre, if tending to make the nervous fibre a bit twangy.

Current Mood: eek!

Well, that was pretty awful. The older I get, the worse I handle late nights (and, it has to be said, the Demon Drink). Becoming horizontal at about 11pm after a particularly vociferous closing session to Neil's game (we won!), I thereafter spent several frustrating hours pursuing a small, blinking, bi-coloured light around the walls of my room at about head-height. Then, as hypnagogic hallucination gave way to actual dream, I sat through a dreary and interminable faculty selection committee where, despite the fact that I was actually one of the candidates, I had to watch all the rest being interviewed. No-one on the committee would explain why this was necessary, merely looking knowing and making off-hand remarks about how the candidates weren't actually the candidates, anyway. In the middle of it all the Dean's secretary, prompted by an incomprehensible crisis of some sort and acting on a direct instruction from the Dean, hustled me off to catch a plane to Bombay. I still don't know why. I am, however, once more a little frayed.

In an effort to inject some slightly more positive energy into the day, herewith a list of Things I Have Recently Enjoyed.

The new Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. I spent Monday evening ensconced on the sofa with the Hobbit, chortling at intervals. Terry Pratchett is still very much Terry Pratchett, although I found the book a little scattered and over-busy in its themes and sub-plots: I suspect we're seeing actually a very good writer coming up against the slightly over-simplified limitations of his genre, and being driven to complicate them. The result is a bit cluttered, but the characters are as always warmly human, the digs at both football and academia are very happy-making, and the issues being explored (prejudice, mostly) are real and sharply pointed.
Supernatural. About halfway through the first season: I am somewhat charmed by this series even though its monster-of-the-weekishness is not the only thing it's ripped off from the X-Files. (I swear you could do a direct episode correlation chart). Like the X-Files, it works because of the dynamic between its central characters, who are rather nicely-drawn brothers with a fairly realistic array of tensions, affections and differences. Also, extended road-trip. The actual working-out of the Supernatural Dingus Du Jour is not about reality at all, and I get a bit miffed about lack of consequences such as arrest, but it's a reasonably endearing watch.
Buffy Season 9, i.e. the comics. Joss lets loose without budget constraints, leading to Giant!Dawn, Fray crossovers and whole episodes inside someone's supernatural head. I'm finding the artwork a bit variable - love some versions of the characters, hate others - but the plots are interesting and compelling, and it's a lot of fun to watch the characters develop post-Sunnydale. Buffy is considerably less annoying, too.
smoczek's fajitas. Yum.

Current Mood: undead undead undead

Oh, ADSL, how do I love thee? let me count the ways. The ways your little lights blink on, finally, after two weeks of sullen silence while I swear and Telkom staggers obliviously from incompetence to denial. The way I now actually connect to the internet to fritter my time away with random browsing instead of having to fritter it away with Shadow Magic. The way you're fast, and not given to the temperamental mood swings of the Iburst. The way that I now don't have to endure a four-day weekend without internet access, since that would infallibly result in twitching and bodies buried in the garden. The way that the Evil Landlord's computer is now instantly connected any time he chooses to plug in the cable, which mostly he doesn't owing to paranoia. (What's with that, anyway? your data will all leak away if you leave the ADSL perpetually connected? or will evil hacker pixies steal it?). And the way that I sneakily pay for you, since the EL would never let me pay for the Iburst. Heh.

My Personal Imaginet Guy eventually traced the problem to an improbable concatenation on the Telkom exchange, wherein the whole thing was not converting a TLA number of some sort that I can't remember into an actual phone number, which consequently the Imaginet system couldn't recognise. Rather than telling Telkom to sort out the exchange, which is an unpleasant and frequently futile sort of process, he did a sort of nifty workaround by telling the Imaginet system to recognise the TLA number, and all the magic little lights came on. I still want to marry him.

I watched Zodiac last night, which was sort of meh despite good performances and RDJ. More importantly, the nightly Middlequest continues. Episode 5 gives us, in the Particular Silliness Department, Peruvian flying pike and an energy drink called "!!!!", which you pronounce by stamping your foot and raising your hands while looking startled. (The Middleman himself is particularly cute while doing this). Goofy Middlemisms include "Flowers for Algernon!", "Hot diggety dog!", "Great hearts of palm!" and the trademark "Oh, phooey!", with a new foray into similes: "like a Bengal elephant", and "explode like a sausage casing full of weasels". Points for the first appearance of the villainous catchphrase, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity" and for zombies shambling around demanding "Trooooout!" Did I mention that I love this show?

Current Mood: four-day weekendish

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with tv

there's an escaped fish

the house always wins

that's what Tiggers like

game over, moonpie

there's something else: the clockwork in a maiden's heart

March: going out like a lion

I'm beginning to wonder why

there's a pattern emerging

he will knock four times, and we'll refuse to bloody well answer

melodious twang

both mean and complicated

down these meme streets

apparently I will be upbeat if it kills me

on the not-quite-first day of Christmas the cosmic wossnames gave to me...

why is it our job to save everybody?

lollipops and candycanes

whoever the hell she is

it's only natural

every night after dark in a dreamy, delirious fight

the badger shouldn't bare its teeth when peace sits at the tea-table

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December 2024

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