randomosity (and more DS9)
Back from visiting my family, which included a three-day trip to Legoland with my siblings and their kids. Five adults to care for five kids, and it was still a full-time job for all of us, what with the thousands of other people around! Still, the trip was great fun, and so was hanging out at my parents' for a couple of days afterwards, with the kids testing their new toys and the rest of us taking a breather. :-)
Though I think my favourite bit was seeing the Picasso triggerfish.
***
Coming home, I read the newspaper and found this gem of a headline: "Christer Sjögren tolkar Lady Gaga" = "Christer Sjögren covers Lady Gaga." For those of you who aren't familiar with Sjögren, he's the guy in this clip. (I apologize in advance to anyone allergic to extreme smarm.) The thought of him covering anything by Lady Gaga is amusingly horrifying.
***
LJ hasn't sent comment notifications properly lately, but I found the comments on the DS9 posts anyway, and THANK YOU SO MUCH for all the fic recs and discussion topics! Because of my journey, I haven't had time to read all the fics yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.
I'm also thinking of ficcing myself - yes, yes, with the usual "because I don't have enough half-finished fics already" caveat - and am thus contemplating questions such as "How do Trill symbionts reproduce?" "Who captains DS9 after Sisko?" and "How heavy-handed can I get with certain topics before people sigh deeply and give up reading?" *grin*
Plus, I'm reading the suggested tropes for DS9 on TvTropes. Or I started reading, but then I reached "Ambiguously Brown" for Dr. Bashir and went WTF. I then went even more WTF when I followed the link and read, "Dr. Bashir of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine speaks with an upper-class English accent, but to this day his ethnicity remains a mystery. It's possible that his family has lived in Britain for several generations, and he may identify himself as English regardless of skin tone."
It's... I can't even edit the page, because there's no way for my brain to compute that quote beyond WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU???
I mean, let's see. We have a British-Sudanese actor playing a character with an English accent and a surname similar to the Sudanese president's. The actress briefly playing his mother is Egyptian, the actor equally briefly playing his father is British-Israeli with parents from Iraq and India. (Yes, I looked it up.) Honestly? There are WASP characters with a more complicated background than that. I've taught kids with more complicated backgrounds than that.
The only way it's "ambiguous" is if you assume brown people shouldn't sound like Oxbridge graduates, in which case, fuck you.
Sorry to end on a rant. Possibly I'm just a little bit offended. *g* I'll return to happier thoughts in a moment.
ETA: Have edited the TvTrope page to include this protest: "He's an Englishman of Arabic, most likely North African, descent. That he can't be pinned down to one specific country of origin isn't so strange - the same is true of many European Arabs even today." I tried not to be rude. It was hard.
Also, there are several other examples on that page I'm not too keen on, but I'm not editing them, because I'd go crazy trying. Altogether, it reads a little too much like "we've only heard of four ethnicities, how dare you be anything else?"
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/548951.html and has
comments there.
Though I think my favourite bit was seeing the Picasso triggerfish.
***
Coming home, I read the newspaper and found this gem of a headline: "Christer Sjögren tolkar Lady Gaga" = "Christer Sjögren covers Lady Gaga." For those of you who aren't familiar with Sjögren, he's the guy in this clip. (I apologize in advance to anyone allergic to extreme smarm.) The thought of him covering anything by Lady Gaga is amusingly horrifying.
***
LJ hasn't sent comment notifications properly lately, but I found the comments on the DS9 posts anyway, and THANK YOU SO MUCH for all the fic recs and discussion topics! Because of my journey, I haven't had time to read all the fics yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.
I'm also thinking of ficcing myself - yes, yes, with the usual "because I don't have enough half-finished fics already" caveat - and am thus contemplating questions such as "How do Trill symbionts reproduce?" "Who captains DS9 after Sisko?" and "How heavy-handed can I get with certain topics before people sigh deeply and give up reading?" *grin*
Plus, I'm reading the suggested tropes for DS9 on TvTropes. Or I started reading, but then I reached "Ambiguously Brown" for Dr. Bashir and went WTF. I then went even more WTF when I followed the link and read, "Dr. Bashir of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine speaks with an upper-class English accent, but to this day his ethnicity remains a mystery. It's possible that his family has lived in Britain for several generations, and he may identify himself as English regardless of skin tone."
It's... I can't even edit the page, because there's no way for my brain to compute that quote beyond WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU???
I mean, let's see. We have a British-Sudanese actor playing a character with an English accent and a surname similar to the Sudanese president's. The actress briefly playing his mother is Egyptian, the actor equally briefly playing his father is British-Israeli with parents from Iraq and India. (Yes, I looked it up.) Honestly? There are WASP characters with a more complicated background than that. I've taught kids with more complicated backgrounds than that.
The only way it's "ambiguous" is if you assume brown people shouldn't sound like Oxbridge graduates, in which case, fuck you.
Sorry to end on a rant. Possibly I'm just a little bit offended. *g* I'll return to happier thoughts in a moment.
ETA: Have edited the TvTrope page to include this protest: "He's an Englishman of Arabic, most likely North African, descent. That he can't be pinned down to one specific country of origin isn't so strange - the same is true of many European Arabs even today." I tried not to be rude. It was hard.
Also, there are several other examples on that page I'm not too keen on, but I'm not editing them, because I'd go crazy trying. Altogether, it reads a little too much like "we've only heard of four ethnicities, how dare you be anything else?"
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/548951.html and has
comments there.