maggie touches grease with her hands

I saw many things over the weekend:

. Star Trek. HOMG LOOOOOVE. I don't even have anything more intelligent to say than that. There is not one iota of this movie I didn't like, except for Jim Kirk's mom. Seriously, I saw her and was like, "why do i hate her already? she hasn't even DONE anything!" and then I realized she was Cameron from House, which means that I've spent quite a few years hating her stupid face to begin with. Excellent. Also: soblazn_chekov and singularity.

. Southland. Could Lydia Adams be ANY MORE AWESOME? I don't think it's possible, but she'll probably prove me wrong. Also, I keep getting tugs at my nostalgic heartstrings for Homicide; I think this is the first cop show since H:LotS that I've ever enjoyed so much. Also, am happy to see Ben McKenzie getting good work while that douchebar Adam Brody is nowhere to be seen. Boy, this entry is full of schadenfreude.

. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. I can hardly believe how beautiful and warm and charming this show is. In a media world that says "Africa" to mean corruption and poverty (and often used in a maddeningly generalized way, like 'in africa they do ___' or 'ororo is from africa' as if all of the countries are the fucking same and it's not a ginormous continent), this show offers a Botswana that is undeniably lovely. In the eyes of one of its children, no less, and not through the lens of a marvelling outsider.

This all makes me so happy! I feel like there's been a dry spell for media I've been interested in, farreals.

Also, I played a demo of and subsequently do not recommend the Wolverine tie-in video game. It's full of excessively violent imagery (come on, do we *really* need to see him lift a man's head into rotating helicopter blades?) and all of the people you're slaughtering are black and non-English-speaking. Also, Wolverine takes a plane to "Africa". O REALLY LOGAN, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

As you can tell, I settled on this name (although I did reserve "reddresspress", since it's too good to release back into the ljsphere, and perhaps I will use it to repost links and "getting my lisa on" entries in one handy place). Goodbye, lj user=stubbleglitter; you've served me well all these years.

We went to see Indiana Jones yesterday, and although I didn't like where they went with it -- NO GENRE-MIXING IN MY INDY, THANK YOU -- it was still pretty enjoyable. The best thing about it was that Shia LeBoeuf's character was basically Armin Tamzarian, which made me laugh every time I saw him. Also, my father wanted to take a sandwich with him instead of buying food at the cinema, and in order to smuggle it in he decided to use ... my green velvet hobo purse. Seriously. If Scarlett O'Hara's green backwards hat were a purse, it would be this thing. When he announced that he was ready to leave, my purse was proudly snugged under his arm; Lori and I actually had to *quarrel* with him to get him to relinquish it. For an old-fashioned guy, my dad is very strange about his lack of concern when it comes to carrying purses or wearing my sister's old sunglasses. I suppose I need no longer wonder where my own slightly skewed ideas on gendered behaviour come from.

Anyhow, I have been eating what my Russian friend Dasha calls "napoleon", which her aunts concocted for her birthday; it's delicious and if any of you come across some I would highly recommend it. Dasha's birthday also provided some tiramisu and some incredible hummus (with tabbouleh mixed right in, yum!), so all in all it was quite the unexpected windfall for me.

In other food news, I wish I had a pommerac SO MUCH. My nani & nana had pommerac and zaboca trees in the backyard, and as they're both rather delicate there is nothing like eating them fresh. For two pear-shaped fruits, the tastes couldn't be more different: pommerac is crispy-sweet and hardly there, with a faint perfume of green apple and indefinable red fruit; zaboca is avocado, but bigger and more flavourful, with a creamy mouth-feel and almost hints of garlic that curl around the sides of your tongue. Oh my yes.

That is all for now; I was going to do that meme where you paste in all your icons of people who are of colour or of alternate sexuality, but I am too delirious with the thought of food at the moment. eep!

I am in the process of tagging all relevant journal entries, and I found an aborted post that had been intended for NaJoWriMo! Most of it is useless, but there's some Supernatural stuff and that I will post here because rereading it made me go HELL YEAH.

Lori and I were talking about it and we agreed that the better female characters are the ones who are not romantically involved with Sam or Dean in any way. Sam's girlfriend was a)pointless, b)a bad actress, c)stilted, and d)completely devoid of any chemistry with Sam. Dean's ex-girlfriend was a)a bad actress, b)smug, c)self-righteous, and d)completely devoid of any chemistry with Dean. And then we have the two ex-Jossverse actresses, and rather unsurprisingly they are both Joss's inexplicable favourites and the two who I found the most unconvincing and downright irritating to watch.

I mean, Darla. I missed the very beginning of the faith-healing episode and haven't rewatched it since, but from what I could tell Julie Benz was doing her same old "I'm so deep and intriguing, now listen to me deliver all my lines in my compelling Baby Voice" routine except without the excitement of syphillis or eventual onscreen death. I never felt sorry for her in Angel or Buffy, and I sure as hell felt no sympathy for her in Supernatural. In fact, I felt more sympathy for ME for having to endure scenes of her trying to look long-suffering and martyred and Dean staring at her with big limpid cow-eyes of admiration.

And then, of course, my favourite of all the irksome twitchy stick-figures I've ever been forced to watch -- Amy fucking Acker. I cannot even DESCRIBE the surge of anger and revulsion that I felt when she lurched onto the screen in that evil-drowning-lake episode; I am at a complete loss to recount the UTTER HATRED I felt when for no apparent reason Dean found her to be the most attractive thing he'd seen since he looked at his brother. WHY?!? Why did the fucking Everybody Loves Fred syndrome follow her over from Angel?!? Why did she get to shoot Dean down with asinine and hateful comebacks? Why why WHY?!?!? God, I hate her so much. I thought maybe it was just the character of Fred, but no, I hate Amy Acker. I hate her stupid gormless face, I hate how she thinks that wobbly voice is adorable and irresistable, I hate her lank brown hair and the way she bares her teeth to show fear and the way she twists her mouth when she thinks she's said something smart. They better not fucking bring that woman back as a refuckingcurring character, because I LIVE WHERE THEY FILM THE SHOW AND I AM NOT ABOVE HUNTING A BITCH DOWN.

But seriously, y'all. If you were hired to flirt with/have a mad sex scene with Jensen Ackles, how hard would it be to act as though you were really into it? HOW HARD?

PS: Dear Sam's Girlfriend,
If one hears a noise in one's room in the middle of the night that sounds like people struggling and finds one's tall strong and handsome boyfriend missing, and one subsequently decides to investigate said noise wearing only bikini panties and the croppiest of baby crop-tops, it seems rather silly to then snittily make comments about going to put on clothes when ogled by the boyfriend's brother. Really, being ogled is probably the best possible outcome of such a scenario. However, this may no longer be a matter of concern to you, as you are now dead and unlamented by anybody except the boyfriend (and then only sporadically). Sucks to be you, Sam's Dead Girlfriend.

I don't know if this can be classed in the "classic Hollywood homoeroticism" genre, but hot damn *I* sure like it anyhow:



In other semi-erotic news, I was talking to xterm the other day about Star Trek novels. I had a bunch of them when I was younger and going through my sci-fi phase (let's not even talk about my westerns phase, my Arthurian legend phase, and my historical bodice-ripper phase), and although we laughed a lot at how Enterprise: The First Adventure was basically a Mary-Sue story complete with 'sexy circus-girl who disses Kirk and has a FLYING HORSE' it reminded me that one of the books I read was about Kirk, Uhura and somebody else getting kidnapped by a ship full of weird aliens who had transparent skin and little neurotransmitters that looked like leeches and crawled around under the transparent skin, and they had different colours of fluid in their skin-sacs and the Enterprise crew got all attached to them once they got to know each other, and then I really *really* wanted to read that book again but could not remember the name of it for the life of me. If any of you recognize what the hell I'm talking about, please tell me the name of the book! I'm dying to read it again. Er, and hopefully find it used, ahahah.

As for the Everwood finale last night, stuff happened like I expected it to, and even if some of the things seemed a little rushed you couldn't blame them. All in all, it was more satisfying than most series finales (QaF, I'm lookin' at YOU. You too, Angel) and glockgal, silvrsolace and I pretty much cried from beginning to end. I'll miss you, Everwood, and all the time I spend thinking about how Ephram would make a great Timmy Drake and how much I love Miss Amy. Le sigh.

( last night's gilmore girls. )

Also, if you've ever wondered what X-Factor would have been like if it had been made up of people from *nsync, wonder no more. (Why do I write such dumb niche things? Who other than like, *three* people on my fl would even care about this? Goddamn!)

omg WHY do I insist on watching 7th Heaven?!?! On tonight's episode I was subjected to the following:

- detention where Ruthie's music teacher played endless Gershwin and children started SHOWING UP VOLUNTARILY b/c they loved this so much
- intense discussion about how it's okay if the white man co-opts the black man's music because they make it TIMELESS, like Gershwin
- followed by some girl disdainfully implying that black music (she listed Kanye and Fiddy) doesn't last in people's memories and hearts, the way Gershwin does
- Annie pawing the piano, prying into Ruthie's business, praying to Gershwin, and whining out some version of "I've Got a Crush on You"
- Simon randomly calling Ruthie and asking her, "Say, Ruthie -- do you know of any music that's classic and timeless?!?" Why, of course, Simon! It's GERSHWIN!!
- Ruthie picking out Simon and Eve's wedding song. And then Eve singing "Embraceable You". You know why? Because she loves GERSHWIN.
- Ruthie crying melodramatically and claiming that nothing will ever be good again b/c music teacher is getting fired and the Gershwin is leaving her life
- the revelation that Ruthie's friend is homeless (and therefore sings Gershwin on the street and rides buses all night for warmth); not only that, but her WHOLE FAMILY is homeless. Because her parents are ILLITERATE. And yet, Ruthie's friend knows the entire Gershwin songbook.

And then a wrap-up of Ruthie's music teacher (think of that episode where Dustin Hoffman was the voice of Lisa's substitute teacher, but gayer) playing piano in detention while Miss Ruthie weeps. Also, I never want to hear the word Gershwin again. I do, however, need to go find my Sinatra: The Capitol Years and listen to a *good* version of I've Got a Crush on You.

I got two cards from prettypinkkitty and paintedmaypole, both of which in addition to being lovely to look at are full of chatty, warm wishes. Thank you both immensely! Reading those cards filled me with happiness and contentment. I am not usually so sappy, so you can be assured that I mean it. *g*

Everybody seems to be posting about what they dreamt last night, and I feel all lemmingy; however, this means sorting out my rambling nightmare concerning:
1)every room gradually and ominously growing dark the moment I entered
2)three old grandmothers who moved like they were one creature
3)a white closetlike bathroom where the toilet flushed into perpetuity, and
4)a faith-healing dog who kept saying, "still? still? still?" while it looked at me

--into something that approaches sense. Which I cannot do. But at least I can talk about ( Lost! )

You guys, I'm so sorry your memories have been wiped. Just to let you know, you all owe me money. And feedback. But mostly money.

At any rate, I rudely instructed callmesandy to write me a ficlet about Ruthie Camden, and because she is sweet like maple candy (er, Sandy, that is) she complied. And y'all, it is GOOD. In fact, to explain why I want Ruthie-fic to begin with, I will link to the photo that made me go ( omg SO HOT: )

And because God punishes me instantly, the television is now showing an episode of 7th Heaven where zygote!Ruthie is complaining about a boy seeing her panties. I repent, Lawd!! At least I have this lovely icon that northernveil made to soothe me.

silvrsolace was kind enough to lend us her Angel s5 DVDs, which we've been devouring voraciously. And y'know, there are developments that are somewhat sudden and hard to swallow (hello, Gunn), but all of that pales next to our revitalized, abject hatred of FRED. Which I would like to dissect at this point (and marej, I expect full agreement from you at least. *g*).

( spoilers for Angel s5 discs 1&2! )

A Series of Unrelated Discourses

-So I was eating one of those new twelve-grain bagels from Tim Hortons (which I got solely because I like the way the girl says it in the commercial), and I was thinking, y'know--I can't even come up with twelve grains off the top of my head, what the hell is in my bagel? A quick scan of the Tim Hortons website did nothing, but eventually I found an organic breadmaker's recipe and in case any of you were curious, likely what's in your twelve-grain breadstuffs are wheat, barley, millet, oats, brown rice, rye, corn, triticale, spelt, buckwheat, quinoa, and soybean. Don't ask me what they are. All I know is they tasted good toasted with some butter on them.

-Here is my impression of watching Everwood on Monday:
ANDY: blah blah blah ignoring my children blahblah
ANNE HECHE: Well, thank the Lord and pass the turkey!
ME: wtf even SAWYER would be ashamed to use a quip that stupid!!
SHABNIZ: Is she off the screen yet? TELL ME WHEN SHE'S OFF THE SCREEN!!

-Now, before the bagel, in the library this morning I found a book called "Sirius: a phantasy of love and discord" by Olaf Stapledon, written in 1944. It's about a scientist breeding a super-intelligent dog named Sirius who is brought up with the scientist's infant daughter, Plaxy. The two...fall in love? Sirius goes to Cambridge and begins writing a monograph on smell in dog culture entitled "The Lamp-Post", to be followed by his super-secret memoirs called "Beyond the Lamp-post". Sirius composes music and learns how to herd sheep. Sirius goes to live with a vicar because he is experiencing a turmoil of soul while being haunted by the question as to whether or not, as a dog, he even *has* a soul. Plaxy rejects him, is attracted to him, rejects him again. They live together and terrible scandals spread throughout their Welsh village about the unspeakable vices that Plaxy is subject to from that Satan-dog. Plaxy tells her now-husband, the narrator, that Sirius once told her that she "is the scent that he will follow always, hunting for God".

I finished the book in around two-and-a-half hours, so it's not a difficult read. And if you find it, you REALLY SHOULD read it. Especially if you like Sirius/Remus. It reads more like a slightly scientific memoir than a science-fiction or fantasy and it's...just...indescribable. Really.

-In other news, I think shinyandnew is making a bid to keep up with popstoryfinders' level of batshittery.

ETA: link courtesy of geneli4 -- January 27th is Rabbit Hole Day. I love this idea. LOVE IT.