Less fun than a spiked barrel full of rabid monkeys but more fun than picking up dog hair
This weekend, I got less work done than I should have, but more than if I hadn't worked on the weekend. This is one of those glass half empty situations, isn't it. I can't wait until this release ships. I've been kind of spotty about LJ recently, and probably will be for the next couple of weeks too, and I've missed a bunch of birthdays.
So let me take this opportunity to wish a very, very late but happy birthday to raffaella and jonquil and cindermom, and a slightly early but equally happy birthday to thedeadlyhook and dragonflymuse!
* * * * *
My neighborhood had its annual neighborhood festival this year. It was pretty low key, but the booths and attractions have been getting consistently better since it started 10 years ago. San Francisco is very much a city of neighborhoods, each with their own distinct character. The Haight Street festival has lots of music, the Folsom Street Fair has lots of men in leather chaps, and my neighborhood has lots of children and dogs. So, appropriately enough, D. and Mrs. D. came over with the puppydog and the baby and we had brunch and loafed. I had some very good blueberry pancakes and D. and I talked database schemas while Mrs. D. rolled her eyes. We can't help it! I write about a reporting tool and he works on the technical side of marketing analytics. The baby was smiling and gurgling and has much more going on these days than she did the last time I saw her--she wants to talk, she just doesn't have the actual words yet--and the puppydog was shedding like crazy, huge drifts of dog hair flying off his back in clumps with every pet and scratch. (We actually got a dirty look from a couple who was standing downwind while D. was petting him at the festival.) And since they were late getting to my house, I had time to dump out some random TV post-bits I've been keeping in a file.
* * * * *
I was really positively impressed by the season finale of The Dresden Files, so much so that I'm really rooting for a second-season pickup (especially if it means an end to the execrable Painkiller Jane). It seems like SciFi has aired the show entirely out of order (and I'm going to ignore "Storm Front," which was a failed pilot that contradicted all the later show's canon and was crappy to boot), but I have actually been really happy with the way the show has developed the magical world, its relationship to the mundane, the way Harry straddles both, and his isolation and caution because he's afraid of what he's capable of.
The show made some fairly significant changes from the book with both Murphy and Bob, but I've been really pleased by both. I love Bob's relationship with his own fate and the fact that he helped raise Harry and is intimately connected with a past Harry is keeping secret from most everybody else; Bob fusses over Harry, and Harry grounds Bob and gives his existence meaning. And while I still am not quite sure why they made Murphy a single parent, by the time "Second City" rolled around and her relationship with her father came up, I do think it has worked to draw her as someone who had problems with her own parent, might have fallen too young into the wrong relationship to get away from him, and is older and wiser now but still lets a tiny part of herself hope. She was adorable in the finale getting drunk with Harry, and more than that, she completely rocked when she walked into Harry's place, immediately sized up that the menfolk were about to make some decisions for her own good without consulting her, and shut them all down. It's a fairly episodic show (and I suspect SciFi would like it to be even more so), but they've done a good job of developing the monster of the week plots and the character arcs in tandem, and the last few episodes, where family drama and past events played a much bigger role than the episodic plot, that paid off.
* * * * *
I have things to say about Stargate! Have, had, whatever. My SG-1 posts on "Line in the Sand" and "The Road Not Taken". The latter contains casting spoilers for Season 4 of Stargate Atlantis), speaking of which...
SGA 3.12 - "Echoes"
This was a pretty well put together follow-the-trail-of-clues episode, with the characters making reasonable guesses based on the information they had, so I liked that (I particularly liked that Teyla, when she started seeing things, very sensibly got herself checked out by Carson, and wondered if a nearby Wraith could be causing the visions, instead of worrying in secret). One of the things I originally liked about the show, thematically, was the Atlantis expedition as inheritors of this city, trying to draw on its history to take care of it while it's theirs but having to piece together clues from the past. However, I confess that the promos really had me looking forward to an episode of When Whales Attack! So the fact that the big cuddly whales did not, in fact, turn evil and attack Atlantis was kind of disappointing.
Also, now I really want a scene where Sam finds out that Rodney named his favorite whale after her.
SGA 3.13 - "Irresponsible"
As long as we're going with one-word adjectives that start with "i" in naming Lucius episodes, I hope they just come out and call the next one "Irritating," because like Ronon said, "You have got to be kidding me." I had serious issues with the last Lucius episode because it was (a) dumb and (b) treated this guy using chemicals to get women to have sex with him as a joke, and at least this episode wasn't problematic on that level. I found myself longing for the days when the Genii were scary and Kolya's hostage-taking had an element of real danger to it and the Atlantis team really had to contend with blowback from early missteps, enemies mistakenly made, part of their footprint on the Pegasus galaxy. I feel like the show is trying to become something very different from what it was in the beginning, shedding the early themes of outpost in exile and colonialism in favor of more lighthearted adventures with beloved characters (in SPACE!), but it's not a particularly character-driven show, structurally, so I don't see how that's going to work.
This episode did have the kernel of an interesting theme, though--a television episode about a team of extraordinary people who have fantastic adventures in far-off places, and the characters discussing their heroes (John likes Evil Knievel, Ronon mentions a former commander, Rodney prefers Batman, because they identify, even though they don't see themselves as heroes), and Lucius making himself a hero to the people of the village by retelling the stories of their mission reports and trying to artificially create new legends.
Also, sdwolfpup just tipped me off to this set of spoilers for 4.08 and--!!!!!!! Please, for the love of all that's holy, let that be some kind of misleading fake-out. Because they said they were giving Teyla a storyline in Season 4, but that was not what I had in mind. I'm not going to make dire threats at this point, because there could be a lot more to it than the spoilers indicate, but the show already has enough problem writing female characters, and if the only "interesting" thing they can think to do with Teyla is make her pregnant, I suspect there will be RAGE.
* * * * *
The Office 3.21 - "Product Recall"
This wasn't the strongest episode ever, but there was something randomly, ludicrously hilarious about the obscene cartoon watermark and the crisis it spawned. Adding to the absurdity: Creed as quality assurance. There's something ruthlessly feral about Creed that comes out in these situations; he immediately went into damage control mode, not to deal with the problem, but to ensure that someone else took the blame for it. He's on a parallel but entirely separate track from the rest of the office in situations like this, reacting to the same circumstances but in ways that are entirely about him. The rest of them may hate working at Dunder Mifflin, but they have bought into the workplace ethos that your collective efforts go to benefit the company; Creed, on the other hand, is unashamedly, sociopathically unconcerned with anything but himself, and because of that, he always achieves his goals.
Michael, of course, is as incapable of putting the problem into perspective as he is of judging whether Creed is really the best person to ensure quality. It's a huge event in his life, so it must be a huge event for everyone, and it's time to involve the press and spin the story. He has a narrative in his mind of how these situations play out, with the embattled company manager as hero, of course, and just like when he and Dwight were practicing how he'd successfully plead to keep the branch open, he can't handle it when the narrative veers off its preset course and the offended customer is not sufficiently mollified by the apology. She's not playing her part in the story. I love Pam's weary reaction to having to make the apology video, the practiced routine Michael and Dwight have for preparing him for it, the way it all devlolves into some kind of nebulous threat against the world if it doesn't understand Michael's position.
The more we get to know Andy Bernard, the more it becomes apparent that the aggressive cameraderie and frat-boy sensibilities conceal an angry, immature, and incredibly inobservant man. How did he not know he was dating a high school student? Probably because he was so busy projecting Andy Bernard, Successful Cornell Graduate! to her that he didn't even notice anything about her. I really liked Jim in this episode, though. His Dwight impression was frighteningly good, because unlike Andy, Jim is incredibly perceptive, and that's how he was able to get Andy to sing through his rage attack. (Dwight's somewhere in the middle; he notices things--he did a pretty good Jim impression himself--but doesn't understand that what he's mocking are things people like about Jim. And it took the holy trinity of bears, beets, and Battlestar Galactica to tip him off to what Jim was doing.)
* * * * *
I've been listening to quite a bit of archived This American Life at work, and really liked their show on television.
katie_m recently wrote a post about the criteria she used to evaluate carbon offsetters; this is something I'm just beginning to think about, and since I've found rapid explosion of companies providing offsets kind of alarming, and it helped clarify my thinking about the kinds of things I should be looking for.
Via molly_may The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon. "Stop touching me!" (Although as someone who picked up both authors well before their comic book phases, I find the comic's coding of their writing as masculine self-discovery sort of problematic, more in Lethem's case than in Chabon's, since Wonderboys was a very male mid-life/authorial second-novel crisis story. Lethem's characters tend to be more off-beat, and Girl in Landscape was very much the story of an adolescent girl trying to redefine herself in relation to her family and society.)
Someone at work recently passed around a link to this incredibly clever vegetable art. I can't decide which I like more, the cauliflower sheep or the upset citrus fruit.
And finally, I'm so sorry if any of you have to deal with this. Holy cats.
So let me take this opportunity to wish a very, very late but happy birthday to raffaella and jonquil and cindermom, and a slightly early but equally happy birthday to thedeadlyhook and dragonflymuse!
* * * * *
My neighborhood had its annual neighborhood festival this year. It was pretty low key, but the booths and attractions have been getting consistently better since it started 10 years ago. San Francisco is very much a city of neighborhoods, each with their own distinct character. The Haight Street festival has lots of music, the Folsom Street Fair has lots of men in leather chaps, and my neighborhood has lots of children and dogs. So, appropriately enough, D. and Mrs. D. came over with the puppydog and the baby and we had brunch and loafed. I had some very good blueberry pancakes and D. and I talked database schemas while Mrs. D. rolled her eyes. We can't help it! I write about a reporting tool and he works on the technical side of marketing analytics. The baby was smiling and gurgling and has much more going on these days than she did the last time I saw her--she wants to talk, she just doesn't have the actual words yet--and the puppydog was shedding like crazy, huge drifts of dog hair flying off his back in clumps with every pet and scratch. (We actually got a dirty look from a couple who was standing downwind while D. was petting him at the festival.) And since they were late getting to my house, I had time to dump out some random TV post-bits I've been keeping in a file.
* * * * *
I was really positively impressed by the season finale of The Dresden Files, so much so that I'm really rooting for a second-season pickup (especially if it means an end to the execrable Painkiller Jane). It seems like SciFi has aired the show entirely out of order (and I'm going to ignore "Storm Front," which was a failed pilot that contradicted all the later show's canon and was crappy to boot), but I have actually been really happy with the way the show has developed the magical world, its relationship to the mundane, the way Harry straddles both, and his isolation and caution because he's afraid of what he's capable of.
The show made some fairly significant changes from the book with both Murphy and Bob, but I've been really pleased by both. I love Bob's relationship with his own fate and the fact that he helped raise Harry and is intimately connected with a past Harry is keeping secret from most everybody else; Bob fusses over Harry, and Harry grounds Bob and gives his existence meaning. And while I still am not quite sure why they made Murphy a single parent, by the time "Second City" rolled around and her relationship with her father came up, I do think it has worked to draw her as someone who had problems with her own parent, might have fallen too young into the wrong relationship to get away from him, and is older and wiser now but still lets a tiny part of herself hope. She was adorable in the finale getting drunk with Harry, and more than that, she completely rocked when she walked into Harry's place, immediately sized up that the menfolk were about to make some decisions for her own good without consulting her, and shut them all down. It's a fairly episodic show (and I suspect SciFi would like it to be even more so), but they've done a good job of developing the monster of the week plots and the character arcs in tandem, and the last few episodes, where family drama and past events played a much bigger role than the episodic plot, that paid off.
* * * * *
I have things to say about Stargate! Have, had, whatever. My SG-1 posts on "Line in the Sand" and "The Road Not Taken". The latter contains casting spoilers for Season 4 of Stargate Atlantis), speaking of which...
SGA 3.12 - "Echoes"
This was a pretty well put together follow-the-trail-of-clues episode, with the characters making reasonable guesses based on the information they had, so I liked that (I particularly liked that Teyla, when she started seeing things, very sensibly got herself checked out by Carson, and wondered if a nearby Wraith could be causing the visions, instead of worrying in secret). One of the things I originally liked about the show, thematically, was the Atlantis expedition as inheritors of this city, trying to draw on its history to take care of it while it's theirs but having to piece together clues from the past. However, I confess that the promos really had me looking forward to an episode of When Whales Attack! So the fact that the big cuddly whales did not, in fact, turn evil and attack Atlantis was kind of disappointing.
Also, now I really want a scene where Sam finds out that Rodney named his favorite whale after her.
SGA 3.13 - "Irresponsible"
As long as we're going with one-word adjectives that start with "i" in naming Lucius episodes, I hope they just come out and call the next one "Irritating," because like Ronon said, "You have got to be kidding me." I had serious issues with the last Lucius episode because it was (a) dumb and (b) treated this guy using chemicals to get women to have sex with him as a joke, and at least this episode wasn't problematic on that level. I found myself longing for the days when the Genii were scary and Kolya's hostage-taking had an element of real danger to it and the Atlantis team really had to contend with blowback from early missteps, enemies mistakenly made, part of their footprint on the Pegasus galaxy. I feel like the show is trying to become something very different from what it was in the beginning, shedding the early themes of outpost in exile and colonialism in favor of more lighthearted adventures with beloved characters (in SPACE!), but it's not a particularly character-driven show, structurally, so I don't see how that's going to work.
This episode did have the kernel of an interesting theme, though--a television episode about a team of extraordinary people who have fantastic adventures in far-off places, and the characters discussing their heroes (John likes Evil Knievel, Ronon mentions a former commander, Rodney prefers Batman, because they identify, even though they don't see themselves as heroes), and Lucius making himself a hero to the people of the village by retelling the stories of their mission reports and trying to artificially create new legends.
Also, sdwolfpup just tipped me off to this set of spoilers for 4.08 and--!!!!!!! Please, for the love of all that's holy, let that be some kind of misleading fake-out. Because they said they were giving Teyla a storyline in Season 4, but that was not what I had in mind. I'm not going to make dire threats at this point, because there could be a lot more to it than the spoilers indicate, but the show already has enough problem writing female characters, and if the only "interesting" thing they can think to do with Teyla is make her pregnant, I suspect there will be RAGE.
* * * * *
The Office 3.21 - "Product Recall"
This wasn't the strongest episode ever, but there was something randomly, ludicrously hilarious about the obscene cartoon watermark and the crisis it spawned. Adding to the absurdity: Creed as quality assurance. There's something ruthlessly feral about Creed that comes out in these situations; he immediately went into damage control mode, not to deal with the problem, but to ensure that someone else took the blame for it. He's on a parallel but entirely separate track from the rest of the office in situations like this, reacting to the same circumstances but in ways that are entirely about him. The rest of them may hate working at Dunder Mifflin, but they have bought into the workplace ethos that your collective efforts go to benefit the company; Creed, on the other hand, is unashamedly, sociopathically unconcerned with anything but himself, and because of that, he always achieves his goals.
Michael, of course, is as incapable of putting the problem into perspective as he is of judging whether Creed is really the best person to ensure quality. It's a huge event in his life, so it must be a huge event for everyone, and it's time to involve the press and spin the story. He has a narrative in his mind of how these situations play out, with the embattled company manager as hero, of course, and just like when he and Dwight were practicing how he'd successfully plead to keep the branch open, he can't handle it when the narrative veers off its preset course and the offended customer is not sufficiently mollified by the apology. She's not playing her part in the story. I love Pam's weary reaction to having to make the apology video, the practiced routine Michael and Dwight have for preparing him for it, the way it all devlolves into some kind of nebulous threat against the world if it doesn't understand Michael's position.
The more we get to know Andy Bernard, the more it becomes apparent that the aggressive cameraderie and frat-boy sensibilities conceal an angry, immature, and incredibly inobservant man. How did he not know he was dating a high school student? Probably because he was so busy projecting Andy Bernard, Successful Cornell Graduate! to her that he didn't even notice anything about her. I really liked Jim in this episode, though. His Dwight impression was frighteningly good, because unlike Andy, Jim is incredibly perceptive, and that's how he was able to get Andy to sing through his rage attack. (Dwight's somewhere in the middle; he notices things--he did a pretty good Jim impression himself--but doesn't understand that what he's mocking are things people like about Jim. And it took the holy trinity of bears, beets, and Battlestar Galactica to tip him off to what Jim was doing.)
* * * * *
I've been listening to quite a bit of archived This American Life at work, and really liked their show on television.
katie_m recently wrote a post about the criteria she used to evaluate carbon offsetters; this is something I'm just beginning to think about, and since I've found rapid explosion of companies providing offsets kind of alarming, and it helped clarify my thinking about the kinds of things I should be looking for.
Via molly_may The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon. "Stop touching me!" (Although as someone who picked up both authors well before their comic book phases, I find the comic's coding of their writing as masculine self-discovery sort of problematic, more in Lethem's case than in Chabon's, since Wonderboys was a very male mid-life/authorial second-novel crisis story. Lethem's characters tend to be more off-beat, and Girl in Landscape was very much the story of an adolescent girl trying to redefine herself in relation to her family and society.)
Someone at work recently passed around a link to this incredibly clever vegetable art. I can't decide which I like more, the cauliflower sheep or the upset citrus fruit.
And finally, I'm so sorry if any of you have to deal with this. Holy cats.