| Poem for Saturday |
[Nov. 7th, 2009|12:43 am] |
( Grief )
I had a pretty quiet Friday -- visit to the post office with insanely long line and only two windows open, walk in the gorgeous chilly late fall woods with lots of squirrels gathering acorns for the winter, and writing my negative-to-scathing review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Perfect Mate". Plus lots of getting up to shoo cats off the heating vents -- there are three vents on the main level of the house and three cats, so I have to check the front window, under the desk, and the back window, and by the time I'm finished, whoever I booted out of the front window is already moving back. This is how I woke up this morning (photos by amused husband who couldn't convince the other woman to budge):
( Cold Cats )
![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif) thefridayfive: ( Seasons )
![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) fannish5: ( Wardrobe )
We watched our usual fall Friday lineup with football in between and after. Neither sci-fi show impressed me overmuch - big epic tragic stories leave me unimpressed these days, there are just too many of them, and I always expect reset buttons sooner or later. Smallville, at least, had some lovely lines and a guest star I had no idea about: ( squee! ) As for Sanctuary, I already saw ( spoilers. ) |
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| Poem for Friday |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|12:39 am] |
( Sonnet for Caesar )
I spent a very nice afternoon with gblvr, who came over (and even provided her own sushi because I am a terrible hostess) and brought the first season of Leverage. The first time I ever saw Arrested Development, I shrieked because one of the series creators is a boy I went through elementary school with, and I had a similar experience in that one of the creators and writers of Leverage is the guy who was the editor of 34th Street, the weekly magazine of The Daily Pennsylvanian, which is where Paul and I met. I feel that I am probably therefore too biased to evaluate the series intelligently, but I will say that the three episodes we watched were extremely entertaining, especially the comic wedding story our former editor wrote.
( Frederick County Bridges )
As for evening TV, I had read some information about the novel upon which FlashForward is based that gave me an inkling what this week's big shocker would be -- ( spoilers. ) Then I did something I never did before: watched a full episode of Supernatural! I'd read spoilers about the format of the episode and figured that might make it worthwhile, plus I had to review one of my least-favorite Next Gen episodes, "The Perfect Mate," afterward so I figured that even if SPN was as sexist as I've often been warned, it would only help give me perspective. ( Spoilers. ) |
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| Poem for Thursday |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|12:40 am] |
( Southeast of Eden )
I had a spectacularly uneventful Wednesday -- did a bunch of reading, worked on some job stuff, took a walk with a neighbor whom I've known for many years but only recently discovered has an amazing history (she grew up in Palestine, her mother taught Moshe Dayan, she fought in the Israeli war of independence). The county traffic lights are all screwed up because of a massive computer failure that has the lights all out of sync and I kept getting e-mails telling me that local roads were going to be clogged, so I stayed close to home.
I am depressed about a bunch of things from Election Day, but mostly I am infuriated at how the media -- even reporters who should know better -- are trying to spin two weak gubernatorial candidates as a referendum on Obama, and not even talking about the places where the Democrats made gains. Yes, the Maine vote is very disappointing, but as in California with Prop 8, it was very close and involved lots of money from a relatively small group of bigots...the numbers are shifting in the right direction even if it's not as quickly as they should.
( On Catoctin )
We started to watch the World Series and yet again disliked the way it was going early on -- plus we cannot stand the Fox announcers -- so we put on the third episode of the current season of Merlin, which I liked because it had lots of Morgana, but did not like because it was lots of shrieking, sniveling Morgana instead of the one whom Uther says never ran away from anything in her life -- if only Uther were in charge of her storylines. (And if only the Druids had anything to do with, you know, Druids, but that's a whole different rant.)
It's no Witches of Eastwick, which remains my favorite show of the new season, though it still hasn't been picked up for the season (and this being ABC, I am betting they pull a Pushing Daisies and don't actually cancel it but don't pick up the back end of the season, leaving it hanging). For once I felt like all three women's storylines were balanced, and I really liked what was going on with Joanna! ( Spoilers. ) |
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| Poem for Wednesday |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|12:33 am] |
( November Philosophers )
I spent a lovely day with melissaukgirl, who drove down from Columbia for what was supposed to be lunch out but ended up being an afternoon at Great Falls, a quick lunch at my house and then Voyager's "The 37s" and Due South's "Odds" (the hand-holding episode, as starfishchick says). I haven't watched any Voyager in half a decade and was startled by two things: how stiff the acting seemed and much I love the Janeway/Chakotay scenes, still, in spite of everything. Also, I still have very great affection for Sharon Lawrence's Amelia Earhart. The actor who played Fred Noonan, David Graf, died quite young of a heart attack, so the episode is kind of sad-nostalgic all around. By then we had realized that traffic was going to be terrible so I told melissaukgirl to stay for dinner and she got to listen to my kids go on about politics and Spore.
( November at Great Falls )
In the evening my family watched the pilot of V, which was okay yet not particularly good -- decently acted and fun to see a bunch of familiar actors, but predictable and slow to get going. Then we watched The Universe's "Science Fiction, Science Fact," which was a lot of fun in that it had many Star Trek clips (including a diatribe about the scientific implausibility of the destruction of a certain planet in the reboot, heh), plus interviews with Trek's onetime science adviser Andre Bormanis and BSG's Kevin Grazier, who had the best line of the night talking about communicators and noting that our cell phones have more technology than Star Trek's communicator had: "I mean, did you ever see Mr. Spock playing Tetris?"
At 10 we reluctantly put on the news, having already received e-mail alerts with expected bad news about the Virginia gubernatorial race. We watched as they called New Jersey for Christie, took some comfort from the fact that the Democrat had a healthy lead in the NY 23rd Congressional District race, realized that the Maine vote on gay marriage wasn't going to be tallied any time soon and put on Comcast's very good classical channel before Jon Stewart. I hope I wake up to good news. |
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| Poem for Tuesday |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|12:48 am] |
( Rimbaud's Kraken )
The kids had no school due to teacher's meetings on Monday, so we met my Paul's parents at the visitor center at Catoctin Mountain National Park. The leaves were a bit past peak but the weather could not have been more beautiful -- about 60 degrees with mostly clear skies -- so we hiked to two spectacular views at Hog Rock and Blue Ridge Summit Overlook. Then we drove to two of Frederick County's three remaining covered bridges, Loy's Station and Roddy Road, where there were more colorful leaves at the lower elevations. My in-laws took us out for dinner at the Cozy Inn, oldest continuously operating restaurant in Maryland run by the family that founded it, which regularly serves the staff at Camp David and has been visited by dozens of presidential visitors.
( Catoctin and Frederick )
We got home in time for Heroes, about which I have little to say (bored with traveling circus, fed up with history rewriting, no longer care about long-term regular characters, sick of resurrections of some first-season characters and rewritten backstories of others). Then we watched Monday Night Football, since Philly apparently plays better when we don't watch than when we do -- I am perfectly happy with the idea of the Saints as Super Bowl champions -- and Jon Stewart's team coverage of sports fans was a delightful ending to the evening. |
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| Poem for Monday |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|12:28 am] |
( Octopus Visiting Your Garden )
We had a very quiet day after Halloween, in large part due to the weather -- we had intended to drive the two hours to Chestertown for the Sultana downrigging, but it was coming down hard at noon, and we reluctantly decided we didn't feel like traveling all that way in miserable driving conditions to stand in chilly rain on slippery ship decks. We briefly pondered going to the Day of the Dead celebration at the National Museum of American History, but by then we figured it would be very crowded, and having been to the fabulous weekend-long celebration at the Native American museum the past couple of years, we decided to pass. So we did terribly exciting things like grocery shopping, CVS, and (in my case) laundry, which is not going to get done on Monday since we're meeting my in-laws at Catoctin National Park -- the kids have no school due to teacher conferences.
( Annual Scott's Run Photo )
It wasn't a bad football day -- the Ravens won by a big margin over undefeated Denver, the Vikings beat the Packers, we saw quite a bit of both games, and the Redskins had a bye week. In the evening we started to watch the World Series, but when the Yankees went ahead, we turned it off and watched Due South instead -- "Mountie Sings the Blues," which we all loved (Fraser singing, Huey and Dewey writing a terrible country song actually penned by Paul Gross), and "Good for the Soul," which was okay (I don't like over-the-top Fraser at this point, here he seems more like the guy from the first season who doesn't understand how police work actually works, and the mob figures are all caricatures). Oh and dark_cygnet made my day by pointing out that Zienia Merton (Sandra Benes from Space: 1999) was the minister in "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith"! Now we are hoping the Phillies pull this out, yay Pedro Feliz! |
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| Poem for Sunday |
[Nov. 1st, 2009|12:49 am] |
( Post-Mortem )
We spent Halloween afternoon at Scott's Run, just as we did five years ago. The weather was gorgeous, quite warm for the season -- nearly 70 degrees. The leaves are just past peak here, still plenty of gold and orange on the trees beginning to turn brown, and lots on the ground with even more falling every hour (we had to sweep the porch twice before evening) so it was a perfect afternoon to spend in the woods and looking at the trees flanking the Potomac River. We saw many dogs, since this is a dog-friendly park -- it was at one time a private estate that the citizens of Fairfax County wrested away from a developer who wanted to cut down all the trees, voting to raise their own taxes to buy and protect the land -- and a heron on an island in the river. Then we came home to carve our pumpkin, which we hadn't managed to do earlier in the week, and Paul made tamale pie for the Day of the Dead. I ate only one single square of Dove Chocolate, so I am feeling virtuous, though I hoarded some Junior Mints for later.
( Trick or Treat )
When we got back from trick-or-treating at my parents, it was only a bit after 9 p.m., and we remembered that we were going to have an extra hour of sleep because the clocks go back, so we put on the 1931 Frankenstein with Boris Karloff as the monster. This bears very little resemblance to the novel, which I shrieked to see was attributed in the credits to "Mrs. Percy B. Shelley" -- oh, but her mother would have been displeased -- but it's the basis of nearly every ripoff and parody ever filmed, which makes it both unintentionally hilarious in places and unwittingly epic in others. I hadn't seen it since college, so had not realized how much "The Mob Song" sequence in Disney's Beauty and the Beast owed to this movie when I saw that. I suppose we really should show the kids the Branagh film but I find I'm more in the mood for the Mel Brooks version of the story now! |
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| Poem for Saturday |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|12:34 am] |
( I Went To Heaven )
This is going to be an all-fannish entry, so if fannish is not your thing, you may want to move along. I wrote a review of Next Gen's "Cost of Living" -- which I love, though if you can't stand Lwaxana Troi, you'd be forgiven for not feeling the same -- while waiting for the second segment of "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith" to air. When my family got home, we watched both parts, and I love that episode even more, ( -- spoilers. )
( Happy Halloween )
thefridayfive: ( Memory and Desire )
fannish5: ( Halloween Costumes )
My parents are home from California but my father is sick, so we didn't have dinner with them; instead Paul made apple and cheddar strata with chicken in mushroom sauce, both of which were fabulous. Then we watched Smallville, which I didn't think was such a great episode -- it's like they can't figure out what to do with Oliver from week to week, though Tess is awesome and I love her -- but I forgive everything, even the stupid Good Morning Metropolis storyline, for the last few seconds when ( spoilers. ) Then we watched Sanctuary, which also had some silliness, but also had awesome women -- I always love Magnus, and go Kate! (I don't think Magnus is fooled by her for a second, which is part of the fun.) Also, any episode in which ( spoilers ) gets bonus points from me. |
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| Poem for Friday |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|12:44 am] |
( The Pope's Penis )
I spent a delightful afternoon with cidercupcakes, who forgave me for not having anything exciting to feed her and brought Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons one and five. First we had to get my irritable DVD player working; it had decided it was a Region 2 player, and rejected all my professional discs with a "Wrong Region" warning, requiring that the machine be restored to factory settings -- something not easy to learn from the minimal manual. But we figured it out, and then we watched "Teacher's Pet" and "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" (which I had not seen before, never having watched the first season), plus "Checkpoint" (which I had seen, but it's one of the best ever, with the Council of Watchers and Glory and how Buffy lays the smackdown on everyone and how Giles adoring her).
( South Mountain Creamery )
I am liking FlashForward a lot, though I feel like that could turn on a dime if they killed off the wrong character in the wrong way or just screwed around and dragged things out too long. Right now the pacing is terrific and I like all the characters; I like that the men are as focused on their relationships as the women, and the women as focused on their careers as the men, and it's a reasonably diverse cast without too many obvious stereotypes. ( Spoilers. ) I can't say that I enjoyed the World Series tonight, but a lot can happen in Philadelphia! |
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| Poem for Thursday |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|12:49 am] |
( The Freshness )
I don't have a great deal to report other than my delight at seeing President Obama sign the inclusive hate crimes bill into law -- the first time a federal measure has protected GLBT rights along with the rights of other citizens. Now if only he would keep his campaign promise to overturn Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I will feel better about him despite his backtracking on health care and Afghanistan -- it isn't as if Americans hadn't been explicitly told that he intended to overturn it when we elected him, he said so several times -- no one can complain he turned out to be a secret liberal! I had a nice afternoon in that there were three white-tail deer walking in the woods at the same time I was, and I wasted far too much time in the late afternoon and evening setting up a Superpoke Pets club, then inviting people and explaining clubs to them since Superpoke didn't bother to do so before having them go live (and promptly crashing a bunch of other things). I think I may have irritated a couple of people by making Adam an officer, but he wanted an officer badge, and what's a mother to do?
( High Knob and South Mountain )
We watched the World Series until Eastwick, and it was a happy couple of hours indeed...if the entire series goes this way, I will cease complaining about anything the Redskins do this season (I know I said I wasn't rooting for the Redskins till they changed their name, but I simply cannot root for Dallas or the Giants, and now that Michael Vick is on the Eagles, I would prefer the Cowboys in a crunch...the entire division makes me barf). I adored Eastwick this week -- an entire episode about female bonding in which men and what they want are secondary, particularly so far as Kat is concerned -- I am loving her character lately. ( Spoilers. ) |
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