sundries

[rm]

Food yesterday: some deviled eggs (egg, olive oil, mustard, paprika), some potato salad (potatoes, shallots, garlic, lemon juice, cinnamon, olive oil, mustard), homemade guacamole, corn chips, salsa, salami, cheese, a jelly baby, coconut ice, lemonade, rose wine, hummous, carrots, gluten-free birthday cake (yellow cake, chocolate icing, raspberry filling), a miniature gluten-free apple pie, chocolate pomegranate candy.

We had a lovely birthday for Patty in the park. When we came home we tied all the balloons we got her (minus the one that broke and the two we gave to kids) to the bed and watched Angel until we passed out.

This morning I was griping about needing to get out of bed for some minimal morning ablutions before being amorous, and said "you know, this is what sucks about life not being like fanfic."

Patty's response? "But there's less kidnapping, rape and song fic!"

I thought I was gonna die laughing.

I am very excited because this morning I remembered that Snape deathgod/northstar essay someone in fandom did ages ago, and how I totally need to cite that in my Bristol paper. It's weirdly relevant to Sherlock Holmes too. I need to email the Cardiff Cataloguer again today, and maybe I will start working on the essay today too. I also need to do the werewolf edits, and start structuring my Buffy essay. Additionally, I need to start formulating with slightly more solidity the "Doctor Who and the Deromanticization of Immortality" idea for a conference next year.

I may have said this before, but I'm starting to think that my feelings about Wesley on Angel are similar to how a lot of fandom felt about Ianto.

Because what do I have to say to you about Ianto? I'm still back at "identifying with the dude in love with the guy that dies is a Really Horrible Experience." And in a lot of ways that's not only all that needs to be said, it's all that I'm willing to say. Sums up the weird and the awful and the character deficiencies (or utter fineness, depending on your perspective) of my nature.

But Wesley? I want him to be okay. I'm rooting for him. I want life to be good to him because someone should give a crap, and because he's more than a little like me. When he got shot in one of last night's episodes, I made this noise and Patty put her hand on my leg, and I thought "oh, this must be how other people feel about Ianto." When Ianto got in dangerous situations on Torchwood, I never worried about him, not until the end; he'd handle himself. Part of my mechanism of reaction to the character was a certain faith in him. But the mechanism of my reaction to Wesley is different. I don't trust him to handle himself and I don't trust people to care for him the way I think he should be cared for.

It's interesting for me to compare and contrast. Because I think my response to Ianto is much weirder and harder to talk about, but when I puzzle this out, it's my response to Wesley that I intellectually think is the more ridiculous. After all, he's a big boy and someone else was writing him.

Meanwhile, the Angel episode where Wesley gets shot and the zombie police brutality is remarkably smart. It's amazingly paced and it dealt with a lot of ugly, fucked up issues without being screachingly offensive (although there were some missteps here and there - what with the voodoo stuff (although that could have been worse, considering the epic Wicca-fail that is Buffy) and the random drug dealer character who was one cliche after another). I was impressed. It was a hell of a thing to take on and the show more or less pulled it off.

Also! This is hell! That could have failed so hard, and actually worked! And Wolfram & Harts 75 year review thing is HILARIOUS.

Have you all seen this TERRIFYING online ad for Butterfingers starring Charisma Caprenter and some dogs doing a take off on the Bad Romance video? This may be the most horrifying thing about acting: what happens to your career after.

Annoyingly, I received a communication from New York State yesterday informing me my taxes are incomplete. The letter says "please provide us with the following things" and then the area where the things should be listed is BLANK. As far as I can tell, I didn't write in zeroes on two lines of the return, and that's what's causing drama.

Anyway, out here in the real world: Hey, car bomb! The government is saying it's being investigated as possible terrorism, and I'm thinking so they mean "we're trying to decide if this is some dude who was trying to blow up a specific person (i.e., not terrorism) or some dude with a bomb for a political agenda (terrorism)" or if they mean "we're trying to decide if this is some white dude blowing something up for a political agenda that we can't link to the Middle East (apparently not terrorism in the appalling racist definition of terrorism in the US) or if we can use this to continue to justify the mess we've made in Iraq and Afghanistan." *sigh*

The oil spill thing is bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. The oil is still spilling. They don't know when it is going to stop. The ecological impact of this is so potentially massive as to be difficult to describe. A the financial impact of this will also be massive, including the costs of cleanup, the damage to the coastline, the impact on the livelihood of people in fishing industries, taxes that are likely on oil and gas, etc etc etc. If you missed it in comments yesterday, here's a list of things you can do to help. And here's another one.

The New York Times' Moment in Time project.

Comments

[orlacarey.livejournal.com]

Oh my...POOR Charisma...

[hab318princess.livejournal.com]

*giggles* helplessly at the video - I know I should feel sorry, but I guess she got paid for it

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

LOL, since we ate most of the same stuff yesterday, I can actually do my food diary accurately. Thanks!

ETA: Also, I said it on Twitter and I'll say it here: Charisma Carpenter HASN'T AGED A DAY WTF.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

No doubt! She didn't even get a single episode of Dollhouse when she still looks like an Active and obviously needed the money this badly? One of the things I like about Joss is that he usually takes better care of his team than this.

[frodo-esque.livejournal.com]

My lord...I have no words for Carisma's Butterfinger commercial. What the hell was she thinking? She probably had no choice, but man, this hurts.

Can't tell if her acting is really that bad, or if it's intentionally like that for the video. She's essentially playing Cordelia...but stiffer.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

It reminded me a lot of how Cordelia would "act" during her commercial auditions on Angel. Yikes.

[frodo-esque.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it!

[count-to-seven.livejournal.com]

One of the rumors in my city is that one of the reasons Charlie Crist lost Republican support so rapidly was that he'd been having talks with environmentalist and state preservation groups about how he could come out against proposed oil drilling 30 miles off the Florida coast before the spill even happened. He has finally made statements to that effect in the last few days, and all it has done is enrage his previous conservative backers further. Because clearly OIL DRILLING IN THE GULF IS SAFE.

[i-amthecosmos.livejournal.com]

My husband works for the Alabama state enviromental agency. He's volunteered to go out there if they need him, but nobody knows what the hell to do.

I work at an upscale grocery, waiting on mainly well-off liberals. I've noticed that while these are lovely people, they well celebrate anything.

They bought all our fresh Gulf shrimp and oysters. Because they aren't expecting any more for *years*.

These are the same people who had wine and cheese parties when Katrina hit. And then went to the centers where people were being kept and volunteered. I can't get a handle on them.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

or if they mean "we're trying to decide if this is some white dude blowing something up for a political agenda that we can't link to the Middle East (apparently not terrorism in the appalling racist definition of terrorism in the US)

Didn't they call McVeigh a " Domestic Terrorist " in the media?

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

wesley's character arc is probably one of the best EVER and you're in for quite a ride

[christinenorris.livejournal.com]

The most amazing thing about the whole NYC car bomb thing (other than I was standing in that exact spot about six weeks ago, which is just distubing)?

That he managed to get a parking space on Times Square on a Saturday night.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

He didn't. Illegal spot.

[christinenorris.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay. I knew he hadn't double parked - that would have gotten too much attention, but all the camera angles made it look like a regular spot.

You would think a cop would have noticed the car earlier from being parked illegally.

[paulshandy.livejournal.com]

When they decided to make Willow witchy instead of nerdy, they really should have figured out just what they wanted a witch to be in their show. As it is, they treated magic in their show the way Star Trek treated technology, adjustable to the plot. As any ST nitpicker can tell you, that leads to inconsistencies. And this is aside from the issue of comparing Willow to the actual Wiccans I've met; the Wiccans I met bent over backwards (or sometimes very forwards) insisting upon the goodness of their Goddess, while Willow, up until S6, seemed to think dabbling with the "dark ones" was great fun. I am not going to say that I met enough Wiccans to form a statistically valid sample, but they seemed to have the same range of believers in magic and miracles as Christians do (some did, some didn't, some kinda).

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

The difference is that Willow was a witch, not a Wiccan. As I understand it, being a witch was something she just was, not a religion she chose.

[gairid.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for all oil spill links.

I recreated the first one to post on my LJ and would be happy to lj message anyone with the coding if
they would like to re-post it on their journals.

Re: Charisma. I could have lived forever without having seen that commercial. It's almost like Cordy when she first moved to LA--chasing down auditions. It made me sad. I liked her character a great deal on Angel (even though I disliked it when she cut her hair D:)

Re - Wesly --

You Said After all, he's a big boy and someone else was writing him..

Yes, that's true, but as you have pointed out there are quite a lot of parallels, as though someone *ahem* was in some way paraphrasing/adapting? Just sayin'.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Oh, god. Angel S5 is going to rip your heart out. Lots. :*(

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'll say this to you in passing here, as I'm undecided as to whether I want to make a post of its own about this (both because I fear an inability to express it as elegantly as I'd wish to, and because I really don't feel like being talked about in the manner I probably would be):

I can love and response to Wesley's character the way I do because of Ianto, because of the one "I" couldn't save, because I know that no matter how much this arc rips me apart, I'm not going to feel guilty at the end of it.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing your perspective on that. It's been really interesting reading your responses to Buffy and Angel, because like you, I found that my responses to those shows were informed by my response to CoE, and since our perspectives on CoE are so different, it's been really interesting to look at how that affects our respective readings of Buffy and Angel (although of course I'm sure there are other factors at work too, given that we've each lived very different lives :)).

I'm also at a weird point now, where I'm starting to feel able to hear and appreciate the arguments of people who liked CoE at bit more than I have been in the past -- so you saying this here is good for me in that way, although that's a weird sort of personal thing that I can't really articulate properly.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I have new respect for Charisma Carpenter as an actress - she didn't flinch at ALL during that hellish ad :(

[only-sound.livejournal.com]

Did you realize you said "minimal mourning ablutions", up there? I'm not trying to be the spelling-police, just giggling, because it's *you*. The mourning with the amorous with the fanfic... "mourning" seemed like it could make sense, in context! I spent a good minute and half trying to figure out just what those "mourning ablutions" might be.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hah, no. I missed it entirely. I've been typing one word a lot more than the other lately.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

Deviled eggs! I was going to teach myself to make these this week. Now I am less intimidated.

You and Patty can laugh, but the winter of my senior year of high school was one long, horrible piece of Counting Crows songfic. *facepalm*

I should not have watched that Butterfinger thing in bed. Can't sleep. Charisma Carpenter's career will eat me.

The car bomb thing made me groan (in a worried, WTF sort of way) for pretty much exactly the reason you mention. Also, as described, it sounds like the least effective attempt at mayhem ever. That suggests to me that the culprit isn't any sort of trained operative. So.