"yoda, spock, dr. laura--they all blur."

[walkingshadow]

a. the other day—one of those days when there was no power and i went wandering around the house pining for just one rumor on any internet—i had this horrible idea for a livejournal community: a character manifesto community, along the lines of ship_manifesto. it was inspired by the fact that i adore lt. col. john sheppard of the cheesy show stargate: atlantis beyond all reason and, likely, all rational thought; and yet there are many people who either 1) are perfectly ambivalent toward him, or 2) hate him, everything he does, and everything he stands for. and not only would i love to spread the gospel of john sheppard in a forum that forces me to use examples and reasoning and sentences that don't include the symbols "<" and "3" and "!" repeatedly in conjunction with each other; i would love to read through somebody else's evidence stack for all their grievances against him.

likewise for someone like elizabeth, whom i hate: the urge to smash her face in every time she opens her mouth grows stronger with every episode, and i suppose i could marshal my arguments and articulate all the things she does that are patronizing and ineffectual and STUPID—but i also know there are people out there who are elizabeth FANS, and i ask, "dear god, WHY?" in all seriousness. i would like to know what they see.

please now tell me all the reasons why we should never speak of this again.

b. dear gjstruthseeker and silentfire,

thanks to malelia_honu's faithful listening habits, she was able to tell me—and i am able to tell you—to listen to this week's broadcast of wait, wait . . . don't tell me!, specifically the listener limerick challenge segment beginning at 10:57. you will be rewarded! or possibly you will suffer post-traumatic flashbacks! but nobody likes to suffer alone.

c. on friday malelia_honu and i ventured out into the world to see prime: we LAUGHED and LAUGHED, not least because several times during, for example, one of the dinner scenes, i pointed at the screen in awe and whispered, "that's my family!" i enjoyed it; i wasn't sure how they were going to handle the ending, but i was satisfied with it; anything else would have been too contrived and/or doomed to failure, but this way they both got to grow and move on, and they gave us all the closure we needed. bryan greenberg reminds me a lot of david krumholtz.

on the way out of the theater we made frustrated motions at the starbucks next door that was just closing up for the night. i don't understand why cafés and coffee bars that are located very close to movie theaters don't make it a point to be open for at least an hour after the last movie is over. mal and i don't even like starbucks coffee, but they were right there, and we would have paid good money for their brewed or baked goods and then sat in their establishment for an hour or so, playing cards or talking about the movie or whatever. don't people do that? instead, nobody got our business, and we came back to my house and played a rousing game of scrabble!

d. yesterday my parents went driving up and down the turnpike all day to attend first the services and then the party for the bat mitzvah of a cousin on my dad's side. "have fun!" i said. i wasn't even invited, but i was more relieved than miffed—these aren't the nice cousins. i went over to cousin m.'s house to watch an episode of boomtown and play with the kittens; then we went downtown for thai food; and then we came back and watched the next three episodes and played with the kittens some more. cousin m. slept through the middle of episode three, but she thinks i didn't notice, so that's okay.

boomtown was a television show that premiered in 2002: nobody watched it; NBC beat it into the ground with sad scheduling and eventually cancelled it early in its second season. i can see why. not because it's a bad show—dozens of bad shows are renewed every year, i haven't figured out why—and not just because it was a really, really good show (which it was), because evidence has shown that really good shows can achieve critical acclaim and popular support, though not as often as one could hope.

its downfall was that it makes you WORK. my parents asked me what it was about, and i thought for a minute before telling them it was centered around crime, because it's not exactly a crime drama, or a legal drama, or a medical and emergency-rescue drama—but it's centered around a crime, and in the course of an episode we get the story of that crime from the points of view of all the regular characters, plus the relevant players that week, e.g. the perpetrators or victims or the relatives and accomplices thereof. the regular characters include two police officers, two detectives (one of whom is played by donnie wahlberg, and i wish i were more fluently versed in pop culture so i could fully appreciate just how funny i suspect that is), a deputy district attorney, a reporter, and a paramedic. their lives are all intertwined, and they all have their own problems, which are revealed slowly and not necessarily chronologically. it's not the kind of show you can put on while you're doing your homework or the dishes, and it's not the kind of show you can pick up mid-season; it's not even the kind of show you can miss an episode or two of without getting completely lost. i think if you missed the pilot, it was already too late. it was an intricately thought-out and beautifully put-together show, and i am completely unsurprised that it didn't make it on weekly network television. it did last a full season though, so at least we have that.

e. the library called on friday to tell me i had items ready for pick-up! which i then dutifully trotted over and picked up. one of the items was the complete first series of the office. we watched the first episode during dinner, and i don't know yet if i'm more amused than horrified or vice-versa. there are more items for the picking-up tomorrow, so i ought to at least get started on paul erdős's biography. cousin m. loaned me her complete chronicles of narnia, and i mean to re-read the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe before the movie comes out; and my mom just handed me the no. 1 ladies' detective agency, which the plain dealer called "one of the best, most charming, honest, hilarious and life-affirming books to appear in years," and my mother thought it was decent, so that's on the pile too.

f. my mom and i went grocery shopping today, and in the produce section by the orange juice we ran into an old family friend, a woman who worked with my mom and whose oldest daughter is my age, though we were never terribly good friends. her youngest daughter (a junior in high school) is apparently having trouble keeping her grades up; the mom asked, not exactly seriously, i don't think, if i tutored: "AP statistics," she asked? and i said i never took statistics, that was the one thing i couldn't help with; but pre-calc i could probably do, and when she asked about "AP english with a wacky teacher?" i said, "AHAHAHA, AP ENGLISH WITH A WACKY TEACHER IS MY SPECIALTY." the caps-lock was mostly in my head. mostly.

that, of course, spurred my mother to later broach the topic of grad school and whether i'd been doing any thinking about it, a conversation from which i had to run away and hide.

g. grey's anatomy. ahaha, i forgot this was going to be the mpreg episode! i missed the very beginning! though my mom taped it, so i could go back and watch. i gather we were talking about talking about people? this is not a show that benefits from the voiceover, i don't think. maybe if it were somebody other than meredith doing it? isn't it a problem when the title character is the least interesting? too bad the mpreg thing didn't pan out.

bailey continues to be awesome. SO AWESOME. i want shepherd to stop pouting just because people are stopping him from having his cake and fucking it too. i don't think anyone can be as awesome as bailey, but addison is putting 110% into it. i like that george is still burke's guy (and hello, why did that woman's heart catch on fire?). alex, blah blah, the tugging on the heartstrings, has he come out of the closet yet?

h. be honest: how many of you filled out jason's nerd search?

Comments

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

oh god, i hear you. it sets off my embarrassment squick LIKE WHOA. especially when they started playing *practical jokes* and i felt just like that temp who obviously wanted to sink into the floor and die. *shudder* i'll give it another episode, but if the horror still outweighs the amusement, it's going straight back to the library.