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.

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[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.