Nostalgia
I've been working really hard, and finally got it together enough to renew my reader's card at the Huntington. And to my embarrassment I was there about an hour when I ran into some colleagues from grad school. THEY were working. One of them is there working all the time, and of course I ought to have been doing this all along. Oh, well.
So of course I haven't been playing as much, and also asthma season has officially started, it seems. I've decided to play the Romans for a while and catch them up with all the other families in the neighborhood, and of course, in my neighborhood, Cassidy Vetinari is a "Roman." So there has been a lot of dating.
Like probably everybody else, I've been noticing all the Michael Jackson stuff going on. I really wasn't a fan of his later stuff. To me, Michael Jackson is the little kid I used to watch when I was an even littler kid. Or, more precisely, he is this:
To me, the Jackson Five was a cartoon family who lived in the TV, probably across the street from the Osmonds. Both of them had a Saturday morning cartoon show animated by Rankin-Bass. They were also on a lot of variety programs, like Sonny and Cher. My grandmother liked those. My parents were very much about Renaissance music and Frank Zappa, but actual pop music, like anything by Burt Bacharach, that was my grandma's kind of thing.
I read somewhere that Michael Jackson felt personally betrayed that everyone who liked him as a child star didn't like him later, but that's what happens sometimes. My childhood was ruined by disco. By the time Michael Jackson came along, I had taken refuge in opera and early jazz like Fats Waller and George Gershwin, and to this day, I'm just not in the habit of listening to popular music unless it is SO popular and maybe controversial that they play it on NPR. And my friends who hung around with me at Rocky Horror--we tended to like stuff like Blondie: Heart of Glass.
Anyhoo, because Michael Jackson is all connected to the Jackson Five in my mind, and since I can't think of the Jackson Five without thinking of the Osmonds, I got curious about what they're up to now. I see Marie flogging the Nutri-System Diet all the time. Jimmy is the closest to my age, and while he's put on a few pounds (hey, who hasn't), he's still got a career performing in England. In fact, he was just in a production of *Grease,* and . . . just watch the clip.
(Ask me sometime about the lyrics about Australopithecus Africanus that I wrote to this tune. )
Then I got to wondering what Donny Osmond was up to, since he was always the big star. I remembered that he'd been doing about ninety seven million performances of *Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.* He's still performing, too, even though his clean-cut image hasn't helped him. A PR guy once begged him to PLEASE get arrested for drug possession. Just once. But I did not know he was in Weird Al Yankovic's music video for *White and Nerdy.* Because as Weird Al said, Donny Osmond is the whitest guy he could think of. You can see him dancing behind Weird Al in the original, here, but this is the greenscreen stuff they shot. It's kind of hilarious.
So now that I've established my geek credentials yet again, I'll admit two more things:
Yes, I have begun another writing project but I am not going to say more about it until there is more;
and yes, I have been tearing my way through the Dresden Files and really enjoying them a lot. A few things I was thinking as I read them:
The Faerie stuff doesn't do a lot for me. I know it's integral to the rest of the books, I'm not seriously suggesting that it be removed, but I find his faeries the least well developed of Butcher's characters (except for Toot Toot and his pals, who have a wacky Barrieseque charm. )
The zillion different riffs on werewolves in *Fool Moon* impressed me, and I say that as a girl who knows her werewolves.
That particular combo of T rexes, zombies, and polka is AWESOME.
A few readers' WTF moments: I was surprised to read that some people thought that the books were sexist because Harry keeps trying to save all these women. It didn't come off that way to me. There are a lot of different female characters. I would like to see a few more female geeks. Still, mostly the women Harry knows (and the female non-humans) are pretty tough and do not especially want to be protected. Same deal with Butters as a Jewish stereotype. Didn't come off that way to me, maybe because I grew up in a very Jewish family with a lot of Jewish relatives, and I don't know any of them who like polka. You really have to put that down as a unique character thing.
Finally, on shipping, and this applies to almost anything I read: I'm a canon shipper, for the most part. There's very little stuff I read for the love story, or for the love story alone. Usually I can figure out where something is going. This is why I'm surprised that anyone seriously thought that Harry and Hermione would suddenly ditch Ron and go off into the sunset. The Ron-Hermione thing is there as early as Book Two. Similarly, I'm surprised that ANYONE could think that Bella Swan was going to wind up with Jacob. I like Jacob; it's just that Edward as her immutable true love was too clearly established early on to make a real switch credible.
I've been reading a lot of theories about this on JimButcher.com and I've been . . . surprised, once again. To me, it's absolutely, blatantly obvious where this has been going, from about page two of the first book. Once again, the reasoning has surprised me--"Well, ____ got there first." "Well, ____ said she wasn't interested." "Well, Harry never got over her." "Well, she'll grow up someday" (how do you get around a literal pitcher of ice water and a flat "that is NEVER going to happen?") "Well, he's just a sex vampire: what would he know?"
My deal with shipping is that I'm good with just about whatever the author wants to do. If I'm wrong, I usually just think, "huh. Ok. Well, it's his/her book." But if I were Jim Butcher, and I had an Unresolved Sexual Tension thing going on, and I had a lot of books left to go, I would not R that UST until I was pretty darned sure I was done.
Also, Thomas isn't just any old sex vampire.
So tomorrow I have research to do, and I hope my asthma clears up a bit, because this is nasty.
Also, to the dorks in Sacramento: I am way out of patience with you.
So of course I haven't been playing as much, and also asthma season has officially started, it seems. I've decided to play the Romans for a while and catch them up with all the other families in the neighborhood, and of course, in my neighborhood, Cassidy Vetinari is a "Roman." So there has been a lot of dating.
Like probably everybody else, I've been noticing all the Michael Jackson stuff going on. I really wasn't a fan of his later stuff. To me, Michael Jackson is the little kid I used to watch when I was an even littler kid. Or, more precisely, he is this:
Click to viewTo me, the Jackson Five was a cartoon family who lived in the TV, probably across the street from the Osmonds. Both of them had a Saturday morning cartoon show animated by Rankin-Bass. They were also on a lot of variety programs, like Sonny and Cher. My grandmother liked those. My parents were very much about Renaissance music and Frank Zappa, but actual pop music, like anything by Burt Bacharach, that was my grandma's kind of thing.
I read somewhere that Michael Jackson felt personally betrayed that everyone who liked him as a child star didn't like him later, but that's what happens sometimes. My childhood was ruined by disco. By the time Michael Jackson came along, I had taken refuge in opera and early jazz like Fats Waller and George Gershwin, and to this day, I'm just not in the habit of listening to popular music unless it is SO popular and maybe controversial that they play it on NPR. And my friends who hung around with me at Rocky Horror--we tended to like stuff like Blondie: Heart of Glass.
Anyhoo, because Michael Jackson is all connected to the Jackson Five in my mind, and since I can't think of the Jackson Five without thinking of the Osmonds, I got curious about what they're up to now. I see Marie flogging the Nutri-System Diet all the time. Jimmy is the closest to my age, and while he's put on a few pounds (hey, who hasn't), he's still got a career performing in England. In fact, he was just in a production of *Grease,* and . . . just watch the clip.
(Ask me sometime about the lyrics about Australopithecus Africanus that I wrote to this tune. )
Then I got to wondering what Donny Osmond was up to, since he was always the big star. I remembered that he'd been doing about ninety seven million performances of *Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.* He's still performing, too, even though his clean-cut image hasn't helped him. A PR guy once begged him to PLEASE get arrested for drug possession. Just once. But I did not know he was in Weird Al Yankovic's music video for *White and Nerdy.* Because as Weird Al said, Donny Osmond is the whitest guy he could think of. You can see him dancing behind Weird Al in the original, here, but this is the greenscreen stuff they shot. It's kind of hilarious.
So now that I've established my geek credentials yet again, I'll admit two more things:
Yes, I have begun another writing project but I am not going to say more about it until there is more;
and yes, I have been tearing my way through the Dresden Files and really enjoying them a lot. A few things I was thinking as I read them:
The Faerie stuff doesn't do a lot for me. I know it's integral to the rest of the books, I'm not seriously suggesting that it be removed, but I find his faeries the least well developed of Butcher's characters (except for Toot Toot and his pals, who have a wacky Barrieseque charm. )
The zillion different riffs on werewolves in *Fool Moon* impressed me, and I say that as a girl who knows her werewolves.
That particular combo of T rexes, zombies, and polka is AWESOME.
A few readers' WTF moments: I was surprised to read that some people thought that the books were sexist because Harry keeps trying to save all these women. It didn't come off that way to me. There are a lot of different female characters. I would like to see a few more female geeks. Still, mostly the women Harry knows (and the female non-humans) are pretty tough and do not especially want to be protected. Same deal with Butters as a Jewish stereotype. Didn't come off that way to me, maybe because I grew up in a very Jewish family with a lot of Jewish relatives, and I don't know any of them who like polka. You really have to put that down as a unique character thing.
Finally, on shipping, and this applies to almost anything I read: I'm a canon shipper, for the most part. There's very little stuff I read for the love story, or for the love story alone. Usually I can figure out where something is going. This is why I'm surprised that anyone seriously thought that Harry and Hermione would suddenly ditch Ron and go off into the sunset. The Ron-Hermione thing is there as early as Book Two. Similarly, I'm surprised that ANYONE could think that Bella Swan was going to wind up with Jacob. I like Jacob; it's just that Edward as her immutable true love was too clearly established early on to make a real switch credible.
I've been reading a lot of theories about this on JimButcher.com and I've been . . . surprised, once again. To me, it's absolutely, blatantly obvious where this has been going, from about page two of the first book. Once again, the reasoning has surprised me--"Well, ____ got there first." "Well, ____ said she wasn't interested." "Well, Harry never got over her." "Well, she'll grow up someday" (how do you get around a literal pitcher of ice water and a flat "that is NEVER going to happen?") "Well, he's just a sex vampire: what would he know?"
My deal with shipping is that I'm good with just about whatever the author wants to do. If I'm wrong, I usually just think, "huh. Ok. Well, it's his/her book." But if I were Jim Butcher, and I had an Unresolved Sexual Tension thing going on, and I had a lot of books left to go, I would not R that UST until I was pretty darned sure I was done.
Also, Thomas isn't just any old sex vampire.
So tomorrow I have research to do, and I hope my asthma clears up a bit, because this is nasty.
Also, to the dorks in Sacramento: I am way out of patience with you.