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corrielle*stumbles onto the screen, looking slightly confused*
What is this place? Let's see... looks like we've got fanfic, some very interesting memes, contests, challenges, communities, meta...
*getting more and more excited as she continues to list*
And over here are some fannish discussions full of equal parts intelligence and squee, and over there I think I see some pretty icons with witty and appropriate quotes attached...
*drops to knees*
Can it be? Can I actually have found my way back? I have! It's lj-land!
*rejoices and kisses the digital ground she walks (kneels?) on*
Having not posted since February, I think it's safe to say that the month of March ate my life a little, but not necessarily in a bad way. School has been incredibly busy, and I've been trying to keep my head above water there while also attempting to start some (probably) overly ambitious projects around the house along the way.
I'm having a blast with my Intro to Lit class. I've taught the equivalent course before at the other college I work at, but this semester I'm taking a very different approach. I'm using a text book this time, since I had more than a week's notice before the start of the course and the book store had time to order it, and my mentor teacher gave me all of her notes and assignments from the last time she taught the class, and I've been merging them with my own ideas where appropriate and filling in the gaps where our reading assignments differ.
For the first time, I taught The Awakening and A Doll's House together, and that sparked all sorts of interesting discussion about women's roles and feminism and literature. (I had never read A Doll's House before I had to teach it for this class... I'm glad I did. Ask me later what my shipping preferences are.) As fun as that was, though, the most fun was the day that we read John Donne's poem "The Flea," which is basically an extended metaphor saying, "The flea bit you, the flea bit me, our blood is already mixed, so let's have sex already." (In much more eloquent language, of course...) Se read "To His Coy Mistress," too, and my students made fascinated and disgusted faces as it dawned on them exactly what Marvell meant by the line about worms in the grave trying her long-preserved virginity... heh. My students, once they got over the "That's sooooo gross!" reaction, were intrigued, and so I used one of the assignments my mentor teacher gave me. We talked about how it was "easy" to write a love poem using pretty things... flowers, doves, babbling brooks, and so on. (We read a few classic examples, and so they were familiar with the tropes.) What's harder, though, is writing a love poem about gross things. So, we made a list of disgusting words on the board (and they really tried to outdo each other here... I think "seepage" won, hands down). Then, I told them, "Ok, now I want you to write a love poem using as many of these words, or words like them, as you possibly can."
And... they DID. Some students went for maximum word count and gross-out effect, and that was fine and highly amusing, but a good number of them grasped the way that poems like the ones that we had read in class weren't "gross" just for the heck of it, but in order to draw an extended (surprising) comparison, and they wrote some really creative, clever stuff. For instance, there was the girl who wrote this longish poem with pretty "elevated" diction and syntax about how the speaker's love was like a pimple, growing beneath the surface and likely to burst forth at any moment... Yech. But so clever. They read some of their work aloud to each other during class, and I think I laughed out loud in front of students more times than I have in the entire time I've been teaching. It was definitely the most fun I've ever had in a class, and a bunch of my students remarked that they didn't know that poetry could be this... well... not-boring. (And some of them were absolutely shocked to find poets from 400 years ago writing about sex, of all things! "I thought they were all a bunch of prudes," one of them told me.) If the relevance and non-boringness of poetry what they come away with from the class, I'm happy.
My other two classes are going well, too. There are still forty students in my English 21 class, which makes grading anything a chore. My English V02 class is humming along, and I'm about to see how my "show a film about the Civil Rights movement" experiment went when I grade their midterms. For the past three semesters, I've based my prompt off of a MLK Jr. essay called "Ways of Meeting Oppression" that we talked about in depth before writing on it. After having several students write in their midterms in semesters past about how MLK "freed the slaves," I decided that we were going to learn a little more about the period, too. And it's a good thing I did... the week before I showed it, I had a kid write in a quickwrite about how Abraham Lincoln probably owned slaves, just like everyone else in the U.S. in the 1860's. When I explained that there had been free states and slaves states, and that this had been a huge political issue, he was genuinely surprised, and seemed glad to have that piece of the historical puzzle. Now, my students are not ignorant, and they are not stupid. The simple fact is, no one ever taught them this, either because they didn't go to school in America except for a couple of years of H.S., or because most U.S. history classes are lucky if they get up to WWII. Anyway, by the time my students get to me, many of them don't even know what all it is that they don't know, and they lack the framework to figure out where to start. (And if someone did ever try to teach them about this particular bit of history, my kids weren't in a place to soak it all in.) So, I checked out an episode of the "Eyes on the Prize" mini-series, figured out how to use the DVD player in my room, and showed it to my class.
After I showed it to them, I asked them to write about something they had been surprised to learn from the documentary. Some of my most common answers were along the lines of:
"There were other Civil Rights leaders. Martin Luther King did not act alone. And some of them even disagreed with him sometimes!" (One student asked me, "How come we've never learned about the other leaders?" I tried to answer him the best I could... which led to a discussion of "Who decides what's 'important' to learn in schools?")
"This happened so recently!" Many of my students were shocked that all of this happened within the past century, within the lifetimes that people who are still living, even. One of them told me that he thought all of this had happened pre-1900.
That previous one goes hand in hand with students who were surprised at the brutality and the openly racist rhetoric. (They got to see a clip of George Wallace's "Segregation now, segregation forever" speech... which I'd read, but never heard or seen. There's something about actually seeing it that makes it hit me more than just words on a page.)
And the last one that about a third of my students commented on went something along the lines of, "There were white people involved in the Civil Rights movement!" (In some of the clips of marches and of the audience during the "I Have a Dream" speech, there are some white faces dotted throughout the crowd...)
All in all, I think it was a success. We shall see how their midterms go in comparison with other semesters I've used this prompt.
When I haven't been lesson planning or grading, I've been messing around in our back yard. I use the word "yard" loosely. We have a pool and no actual grass, but we do have three terraces of plain dirt running across the back of our house behind the pool, some roses and a tall juniper(?)-like tree in the side yard on the east side of the house, and a lemon, pomegranate, and indeterminate-citrus tree (it hasn't bloomed while we've been here until a few weeks ago...) on the west side.
Our dirt-terraces, left to their own devices, have sprouted a healthy crop of weeds, mostly cheese weed, monstrously aggressive bermuda grass, and dandelions. So, when I decided I wanted to plant something on at least one of the terraces, I had to deal with the weeds first. Cheese weed, if you don't know, is a really awful weed. It grows super fast, puts down deep roots, and if it gets big enough, the stems are hard and woody enough to eat through the cord on a weed-whacker in less than two minutes. (I know this from experience...) So, the way I've been getting rid of them is with a shovel and a hose. (Apparently, there isn't much in the way of weed-killer that gets rid of them, and I didn't want reside around where I was going to be growing veggies anyway.) I'd get the ground I wanted to de-weed really wet and saturated, then I'd dig into the ground about an inch away from the stalks, get the entire shovel head into the mud, and see what I could lift out. Time consuming, but surprisingly effective. Getting the ground wet first definitely makes it easier. Working a little bit each day, I finally cleared a good patch of the first terrace. I'm going to cover up the rest of the terraces with some weed-netting and hope that kills them off after a few months. If not... I guess there's always my hose and shovel.
On Saturday, I went around to all of the garden supply stores in our area and checked prices, and then I went back and bought some compost and topsoil and mulch. I've now got mulch spread around the two citrus trees (mostly to mark out the ground where I care about weeds a lot as opposed to the ground where I don't...), some nasturtiums germinating in seed pots (which are supposedly good at keeping bugs away from veggies and fruit trees), some sunflowers in seed pots that I really hope the army of birds frolicking in the pomegranate tree didn't get to, and a bunch of zucchini, yellow squash, and thyme seedlings transplanted into the newly composted area of the terrace I cleared out. I think that Neko was a bit surprised when she saw how much squash I'd bought (OSH was having a sale, and the plants looked really healthy...). I'm sure I'll accidentally manage to kill a couple of them, but if all of those plants survive... all of you who know and see me regularly are going to be taking squash home all summer, and I'm going to learn how to back zucchini bread.
Every single muscle in my body aches from all of the lifting and digging and raking I did this weekend, and I think that the tips of my fingers are still numb from all of the weed pulling. It's worth it, though. So far... my plants look pretty healthy. For the past two days, I've watered them in the morning like I read I was supposed to (watering in the middle of the day scorches the leaves, apparently, and watering at night doesn't give them time to dry out and encourages rot... the things I never knew about plants are myriad). None of them look like they're going into shock, and they seem to have taken well to their new homes. It's supposed to rain here tomorrow and over the weekend, so we'll see how they survive that little adventure.
WoT:
After years of being the only person in my immediate, geographically close group of friends who has read this behemoth of a series, Rae picked up the first book and started reading in December, and she's already making good headway through Fires of Heaven. And she gotald_fan_girl and smexy_pocky to start reading it, as well. For the first time in a long while, I can go on about Aes Sedai, Aiel, and Asha'man without getting weird looks. And I finally have other people who share my appreciation of my most wonderful favorite characters! Being around friends who are reading for the first time, I'm remembering why I love Lan so much... and Mat, and Moiraine, and Nynaeve... and Gareth Bryne and Siuan Sanche... (And who can't stand Elaida either... LIGHT, but she's a bitch...) I'm re-reading myself, now, and I'm halfway through The Great Hunt. I couldn't be happier. I love this series unreservedly despite its length, and having other people to romp around the world in is... wonderful. *sigh* And thanks to my renewed interest, I'm thinking about making a costume for Comic-con. And it couldn't be one of the girls, could it... no, I'm looking for green coat material, a wide-brimmed black hat, a long staff I can make a con-safe spear head for, a signet ring, and a fox head pendant. Burn you, Matrim Cauthon... like I needed another male cosplay outfit in my wardrobe...
Burn Notice managed to give me a bit of heart failure again at the end of this season. This time... Michael is in more trouble than I think he has ever been in before. The build-up with Gilroy was great (and I rather enjoyed his ridiculous faux-flirting with Michael), and the show managed to surprise me when he got blown up... I was sure he'd be around mucking things up once the prisoner was off the plane, but no... "Did I forget to mention I'm attached to an explosive device? You'd best run along now..." *grin* I adore this show. The finale had Sam-Fi-Michael teamwork and friendship at its best, Madeline being awesome and badass under pressure, and Michael dealing with the operative who actually did all of the things Michael got burned for... and we had the return of Management! Like I mentioned before, I think I nearly died of a heart attack when we got to see Michael being taken away to that secret prison, then getting the bag taken off and he's in... a really nicely furnished room? What is going ON, show??? What do you MEAN no new episodes for a while? Aaaaaaaah! And Jeffrey Donovan posting pictures like this one on his twitter account with terribly mean and tantalizing clues is not helping.
Supernatural... continues to be really awesome. I am constantly amazed at this show's ability to take a standard horror cliche (like last week's zombies) and make it new and fresh and interesting and gut-wrenchingly sad. That show has managed to upset me a great many times, but the conversation between Bobby and his wife right before he has to kill her (again) is right up there, and the idea that people wanted to protect their dead loved ones, act like it was no big deal, keep it a secret, seemed very human and real to me.
Rae and I started watching Deadwood last night. I've always loved Westerns, and we've had the first season sitting on the shelf forever. We've seen three episodes, and so far, and I'm intrigued. Seth Bullock is that fascinating mixture of bad temper and good heart that I love so much, his friendship with his business partner Sol is really sweet and interesting, Wild Bill is... really just like I'd always imaged him being, and Al Swearengen is the most awful, terrifying human being imaginable, and he's... fascinating. It's like watching a wild animal going after weaker prey. You feel sorry for the bunny rabbits, but there's a morbid fascination in watching brilliant predators do what they do best.
I can't wait to watch more... though this is a show that, like Rome, I have a feeling doesn't take well to being marathoned. There's only so much proof of the awfulness of human nature I can take in one sitting, even if there are some people who aren't utterly fascinating moral scum.
And then, of course, there is the inevitable case of "Where have I seen that face before?" syndrome. This show is full of it.
First... Lassiter from Psych = Brom Garret, the rich, green New Yorker who gets bilked out of his money. (Living proof that historical clothing and possibly a tuxedo/suit will up any man's attractiveness rating on my scale by a power of ten.)
Bobby from SPN = well... pretty much Bobby's ancestor, the rough-around-the-edges but so far quite nice prospector, Whitney Ellsworth. (I knew I'd heard that gruff voice being sensible but surprisingly understanding before...)
Sheriff Dearborne from True Blood = the (very very) corrupt but really pansy hotel owner, Farnum... I knew I'd been annoyed at the owner of that voice before...
And my most obscure IMDB find...
Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus = Merrick, the newspaper owner. (I LOVE Amadeus... possibly my favorite non-fannish movie ever. And the Emperor's cavalier, "Well... there it is..." as a conversation ender always makes me chuckle.)
And now... for the PotC news. (ENORMOUS casting spoilers.)
As I was looking up Deadwood actors last night, the first thing that popped up for Ian McShane (Al) was "Pirates of the Caribbean 4: Blackbeard." I laughed a little, thinking that the IMDB false rumor mill was already working overtime. I googled it just to make sure. Turns out that Blackbeard is indeed going to be in Pirates 4. He'll be the main villain, in fact. Now, I'm actually pretty excited about this piece of casting news. From what little I've seen of the actor, he'll be a fantastic Blackbeard if the writers/director let him. He radiates menace with a thin veneer of civility with the best of them, and he looks the part. My brain is already drooling over the prospect of him interacting with Barbossa. That's going to be fun.
I'm not so impressed with the second bit of news I ran across. Penelope Cruz is going to be Blackbeard's daughter. Now, last night when I was extremely tired and not reading right, I thought the headline in that article said Barbossa's daughter, and I was ready to spit fire. The daughter of an established character popping out of nowhere screams Mary Sue to me, and I couldn't believe they were going to use Barbossa to get Jack's new love interest/foil into the movie. I guess it's slightly better that she be Blackbeard's daughter, and not poor Hector's. But... but... but still. First, I'm wary of any new female characters, to be honest. Not because I don't like women or female... far from it. It's because I'm afraid of what they're going to do to her and the rampant fail that I worry will ensue. If I had any trust left in this franchise, I would be saying, "Awesome... a new character who happens to be a woman..." but I don't. I worry that she's going to be there to banter/flirt with Jack and rebel against her father. And that's it. Dear PotC franchise-runners: First of all, Jack does not need a love interest in order for this movie to work. Elizabeth and Jack's interaction worked because she was with Will, but there was weird, interesting tension between her and Jack. (Jerry Bruckheimer's words were that there would be "a little" romance between the new girl and Jack... I'm still skeptical.) Second, never ever describe your new female lead as feisty when trying to sell her to the fans. All that means is "we're trying too hard to make you like her... look! She's not all oppressed like the other women in this period! She's feisty!" (Ok, ok... I'll admit that the Robin Hood fandom has killed that word for me. But STILL. I think my point stands.)
So... to sum up my thoughts on what I know so far about PotC4:
Blackbeard = potentially awesome.
Blackbeard's daughter/Penelope Cruz = potentially horrid, but I'll withhold judgment until I know more.
Barbossa coming back = sure to be awesome. I've always thought Geoffrey loved Barbossa as much as Johnny does Jack... he'll take what he's given and make it full of win.
Lack of James Norrington = terribly sad, but understandable.
Potential for mermaids = PLEASE let this be true? Pretty please?
Jack Sparrow on the big screen again = cautious optimism. I love Johnny's portrayal of Jack, and no matter how much the movie screws up other things, Jack is guaranteed to make me smile.
What is this place? Let's see... looks like we've got fanfic, some very interesting memes, contests, challenges, communities, meta...
*getting more and more excited as she continues to list*
And over here are some fannish discussions full of equal parts intelligence and squee, and over there I think I see some pretty icons with witty and appropriate quotes attached...
*drops to knees*
Can it be? Can I actually have found my way back? I have! It's lj-land!
*rejoices and kisses the digital ground she walks (kneels?) on*
Having not posted since February, I think it's safe to say that the month of March ate my life a little, but not necessarily in a bad way. School has been incredibly busy, and I've been trying to keep my head above water there while also attempting to start some (probably) overly ambitious projects around the house along the way.
I'm having a blast with my Intro to Lit class. I've taught the equivalent course before at the other college I work at, but this semester I'm taking a very different approach. I'm using a text book this time, since I had more than a week's notice before the start of the course and the book store had time to order it, and my mentor teacher gave me all of her notes and assignments from the last time she taught the class, and I've been merging them with my own ideas where appropriate and filling in the gaps where our reading assignments differ.
For the first time, I taught The Awakening and A Doll's House together, and that sparked all sorts of interesting discussion about women's roles and feminism and literature. (I had never read A Doll's House before I had to teach it for this class... I'm glad I did. Ask me later what my shipping preferences are.) As fun as that was, though, the most fun was the day that we read John Donne's poem "The Flea," which is basically an extended metaphor saying, "The flea bit you, the flea bit me, our blood is already mixed, so let's have sex already." (In much more eloquent language, of course...) Se read "To His Coy Mistress," too, and my students made fascinated and disgusted faces as it dawned on them exactly what Marvell meant by the line about worms in the grave trying her long-preserved virginity... heh. My students, once they got over the "That's sooooo gross!" reaction, were intrigued, and so I used one of the assignments my mentor teacher gave me. We talked about how it was "easy" to write a love poem using pretty things... flowers, doves, babbling brooks, and so on. (We read a few classic examples, and so they were familiar with the tropes.) What's harder, though, is writing a love poem about gross things. So, we made a list of disgusting words on the board (and they really tried to outdo each other here... I think "seepage" won, hands down). Then, I told them, "Ok, now I want you to write a love poem using as many of these words, or words like them, as you possibly can."
And... they DID. Some students went for maximum word count and gross-out effect, and that was fine and highly amusing, but a good number of them grasped the way that poems like the ones that we had read in class weren't "gross" just for the heck of it, but in order to draw an extended (surprising) comparison, and they wrote some really creative, clever stuff. For instance, there was the girl who wrote this longish poem with pretty "elevated" diction and syntax about how the speaker's love was like a pimple, growing beneath the surface and likely to burst forth at any moment... Yech. But so clever. They read some of their work aloud to each other during class, and I think I laughed out loud in front of students more times than I have in the entire time I've been teaching. It was definitely the most fun I've ever had in a class, and a bunch of my students remarked that they didn't know that poetry could be this... well... not-boring. (And some of them were absolutely shocked to find poets from 400 years ago writing about sex, of all things! "I thought they were all a bunch of prudes," one of them told me.) If the relevance and non-boringness of poetry what they come away with from the class, I'm happy.
My other two classes are going well, too. There are still forty students in my English 21 class, which makes grading anything a chore. My English V02 class is humming along, and I'm about to see how my "show a film about the Civil Rights movement" experiment went when I grade their midterms. For the past three semesters, I've based my prompt off of a MLK Jr. essay called "Ways of Meeting Oppression" that we talked about in depth before writing on it. After having several students write in their midterms in semesters past about how MLK "freed the slaves," I decided that we were going to learn a little more about the period, too. And it's a good thing I did... the week before I showed it, I had a kid write in a quickwrite about how Abraham Lincoln probably owned slaves, just like everyone else in the U.S. in the 1860's. When I explained that there had been free states and slaves states, and that this had been a huge political issue, he was genuinely surprised, and seemed glad to have that piece of the historical puzzle. Now, my students are not ignorant, and they are not stupid. The simple fact is, no one ever taught them this, either because they didn't go to school in America except for a couple of years of H.S., or because most U.S. history classes are lucky if they get up to WWII. Anyway, by the time my students get to me, many of them don't even know what all it is that they don't know, and they lack the framework to figure out where to start. (And if someone did ever try to teach them about this particular bit of history, my kids weren't in a place to soak it all in.) So, I checked out an episode of the "Eyes on the Prize" mini-series, figured out how to use the DVD player in my room, and showed it to my class.
After I showed it to them, I asked them to write about something they had been surprised to learn from the documentary. Some of my most common answers were along the lines of:
"There were other Civil Rights leaders. Martin Luther King did not act alone. And some of them even disagreed with him sometimes!" (One student asked me, "How come we've never learned about the other leaders?" I tried to answer him the best I could... which led to a discussion of "Who decides what's 'important' to learn in schools?")
"This happened so recently!" Many of my students were shocked that all of this happened within the past century, within the lifetimes that people who are still living, even. One of them told me that he thought all of this had happened pre-1900.
That previous one goes hand in hand with students who were surprised at the brutality and the openly racist rhetoric. (They got to see a clip of George Wallace's "Segregation now, segregation forever" speech... which I'd read, but never heard or seen. There's something about actually seeing it that makes it hit me more than just words on a page.)
And the last one that about a third of my students commented on went something along the lines of, "There were white people involved in the Civil Rights movement!" (In some of the clips of marches and of the audience during the "I Have a Dream" speech, there are some white faces dotted throughout the crowd...)
All in all, I think it was a success. We shall see how their midterms go in comparison with other semesters I've used this prompt.
When I haven't been lesson planning or grading, I've been messing around in our back yard. I use the word "yard" loosely. We have a pool and no actual grass, but we do have three terraces of plain dirt running across the back of our house behind the pool, some roses and a tall juniper(?)-like tree in the side yard on the east side of the house, and a lemon, pomegranate, and indeterminate-citrus tree (it hasn't bloomed while we've been here until a few weeks ago...) on the west side.
Our dirt-terraces, left to their own devices, have sprouted a healthy crop of weeds, mostly cheese weed, monstrously aggressive bermuda grass, and dandelions. So, when I decided I wanted to plant something on at least one of the terraces, I had to deal with the weeds first. Cheese weed, if you don't know, is a really awful weed. It grows super fast, puts down deep roots, and if it gets big enough, the stems are hard and woody enough to eat through the cord on a weed-whacker in less than two minutes. (I know this from experience...) So, the way I've been getting rid of them is with a shovel and a hose. (Apparently, there isn't much in the way of weed-killer that gets rid of them, and I didn't want reside around where I was going to be growing veggies anyway.) I'd get the ground I wanted to de-weed really wet and saturated, then I'd dig into the ground about an inch away from the stalks, get the entire shovel head into the mud, and see what I could lift out. Time consuming, but surprisingly effective. Getting the ground wet first definitely makes it easier. Working a little bit each day, I finally cleared a good patch of the first terrace. I'm going to cover up the rest of the terraces with some weed-netting and hope that kills them off after a few months. If not... I guess there's always my hose and shovel.
On Saturday, I went around to all of the garden supply stores in our area and checked prices, and then I went back and bought some compost and topsoil and mulch. I've now got mulch spread around the two citrus trees (mostly to mark out the ground where I care about weeds a lot as opposed to the ground where I don't...), some nasturtiums germinating in seed pots (which are supposedly good at keeping bugs away from veggies and fruit trees), some sunflowers in seed pots that I really hope the army of birds frolicking in the pomegranate tree didn't get to, and a bunch of zucchini, yellow squash, and thyme seedlings transplanted into the newly composted area of the terrace I cleared out. I think that Neko was a bit surprised when she saw how much squash I'd bought (OSH was having a sale, and the plants looked really healthy...). I'm sure I'll accidentally manage to kill a couple of them, but if all of those plants survive... all of you who know and see me regularly are going to be taking squash home all summer, and I'm going to learn how to back zucchini bread.
Every single muscle in my body aches from all of the lifting and digging and raking I did this weekend, and I think that the tips of my fingers are still numb from all of the weed pulling. It's worth it, though. So far... my plants look pretty healthy. For the past two days, I've watered them in the morning like I read I was supposed to (watering in the middle of the day scorches the leaves, apparently, and watering at night doesn't give them time to dry out and encourages rot... the things I never knew about plants are myriad). None of them look like they're going into shock, and they seem to have taken well to their new homes. It's supposed to rain here tomorrow and over the weekend, so we'll see how they survive that little adventure.
WoT:
After years of being the only person in my immediate, geographically close group of friends who has read this behemoth of a series, Rae picked up the first book and started reading in December, and she's already making good headway through Fires of Heaven. And she got
ald_fan_girl and smexy_pocky to start reading it, as well. For the first time in a long while, I can go on about Aes Sedai, Aiel, and Asha'man without getting weird looks. And I finally have other people who share my appreciation of my most wonderful favorite characters! Being around friends who are reading for the first time, I'm remembering why I love Lan so much... and Mat, and Moiraine, and Nynaeve... and Gareth Bryne and Siuan Sanche... (And who can't stand Elaida either... LIGHT, but she's a bitch...) I'm re-reading myself, now, and I'm halfway through The Great Hunt. I couldn't be happier. I love this series unreservedly despite its length, and having other people to romp around the world in is... wonderful. *sigh* And thanks to my renewed interest, I'm thinking about making a costume for Comic-con. And it couldn't be one of the girls, could it... no, I'm looking for green coat material, a wide-brimmed black hat, a long staff I can make a con-safe spear head for, a signet ring, and a fox head pendant. Burn you, Matrim Cauthon... like I needed another male cosplay outfit in my wardrobe... Burn Notice managed to give me a bit of heart failure again at the end of this season. This time... Michael is in more trouble than I think he has ever been in before. The build-up with Gilroy was great (and I rather enjoyed his ridiculous faux-flirting with Michael), and the show managed to surprise me when he got blown up... I was sure he'd be around mucking things up once the prisoner was off the plane, but no... "Did I forget to mention I'm attached to an explosive device? You'd best run along now..." *grin* I adore this show. The finale had Sam-Fi-Michael teamwork and friendship at its best, Madeline being awesome and badass under pressure, and Michael dealing with the operative who actually did all of the things Michael got burned for... and we had the return of Management! Like I mentioned before, I think I nearly died of a heart attack when we got to see Michael being taken away to that secret prison, then getting the bag taken off and he's in... a really nicely furnished room? What is going ON, show??? What do you MEAN no new episodes for a while? Aaaaaaaah! And Jeffrey Donovan posting pictures like this one on his twitter account with terribly mean and tantalizing clues is not helping.
Supernatural... continues to be really awesome. I am constantly amazed at this show's ability to take a standard horror cliche (like last week's zombies) and make it new and fresh and interesting and gut-wrenchingly sad. That show has managed to upset me a great many times, but the conversation between Bobby and his wife right before he has to kill her (again) is right up there, and the idea that people wanted to protect their dead loved ones, act like it was no big deal, keep it a secret, seemed very human and real to me.
Rae and I started watching Deadwood last night. I've always loved Westerns, and we've had the first season sitting on the shelf forever. We've seen three episodes, and so far, and I'm intrigued. Seth Bullock is that fascinating mixture of bad temper and good heart that I love so much, his friendship with his business partner Sol is really sweet and interesting, Wild Bill is... really just like I'd always imaged him being, and Al Swearengen is the most awful, terrifying human being imaginable, and he's... fascinating. It's like watching a wild animal going after weaker prey. You feel sorry for the bunny rabbits, but there's a morbid fascination in watching brilliant predators do what they do best.
I can't wait to watch more... though this is a show that, like Rome, I have a feeling doesn't take well to being marathoned. There's only so much proof of the awfulness of human nature I can take in one sitting, even if there are some people who aren't utterly fascinating moral scum.
And then, of course, there is the inevitable case of "Where have I seen that face before?" syndrome. This show is full of it.
First... Lassiter from Psych = Brom Garret, the rich, green New Yorker who gets bilked out of his money. (Living proof that historical clothing and possibly a tuxedo/suit will up any man's attractiveness rating on my scale by a power of ten.)
Bobby from SPN = well... pretty much Bobby's ancestor, the rough-around-the-edges but so far quite nice prospector, Whitney Ellsworth. (I knew I'd heard that gruff voice being sensible but surprisingly understanding before...)
Sheriff Dearborne from True Blood = the (very very) corrupt but really pansy hotel owner, Farnum... I knew I'd been annoyed at the owner of that voice before...
And my most obscure IMDB find...
Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus = Merrick, the newspaper owner. (I LOVE Amadeus... possibly my favorite non-fannish movie ever. And the Emperor's cavalier, "Well... there it is..." as a conversation ender always makes me chuckle.)
And now... for the PotC news. (ENORMOUS casting spoilers.)
As I was looking up Deadwood actors last night, the first thing that popped up for Ian McShane (Al) was "Pirates of the Caribbean 4: Blackbeard." I laughed a little, thinking that the IMDB false rumor mill was already working overtime. I googled it just to make sure. Turns out that Blackbeard is indeed going to be in Pirates 4. He'll be the main villain, in fact. Now, I'm actually pretty excited about this piece of casting news. From what little I've seen of the actor, he'll be a fantastic Blackbeard if the writers/director let him. He radiates menace with a thin veneer of civility with the best of them, and he looks the part. My brain is already drooling over the prospect of him interacting with Barbossa. That's going to be fun.
I'm not so impressed with the second bit of news I ran across. Penelope Cruz is going to be Blackbeard's daughter. Now, last night when I was extremely tired and not reading right, I thought the headline in that article said Barbossa's daughter, and I was ready to spit fire. The daughter of an established character popping out of nowhere screams Mary Sue to me, and I couldn't believe they were going to use Barbossa to get Jack's new love interest/foil into the movie. I guess it's slightly better that she be Blackbeard's daughter, and not poor Hector's. But... but... but still. First, I'm wary of any new female characters, to be honest. Not because I don't like women or female... far from it. It's because I'm afraid of what they're going to do to her and the rampant fail that I worry will ensue. If I had any trust left in this franchise, I would be saying, "Awesome... a new character who happens to be a woman..." but I don't. I worry that she's going to be there to banter/flirt with Jack and rebel against her father. And that's it. Dear PotC franchise-runners: First of all, Jack does not need a love interest in order for this movie to work. Elizabeth and Jack's interaction worked because she was with Will, but there was weird, interesting tension between her and Jack. (Jerry Bruckheimer's words were that there would be "a little" romance between the new girl and Jack... I'm still skeptical.) Second, never ever describe your new female lead as feisty when trying to sell her to the fans. All that means is "we're trying too hard to make you like her... look! She's not all oppressed like the other women in this period! She's feisty!" (Ok, ok... I'll admit that the Robin Hood fandom has killed that word for me. But STILL. I think my point stands.)
So... to sum up my thoughts on what I know so far about PotC4:
Blackbeard = potentially awesome.
Blackbeard's daughter/Penelope Cruz = potentially horrid, but I'll withhold judgment until I know more.
Barbossa coming back = sure to be awesome. I've always thought Geoffrey loved Barbossa as much as Johnny does Jack... he'll take what he's given and make it full of win.
Lack of James Norrington = terribly sad, but understandable.
Potential for mermaids = PLEASE let this be true? Pretty please?
Jack Sparrow on the big screen again = cautious optimism. I love Johnny's portrayal of Jack, and no matter how much the movie screws up other things, Jack is guaranteed to make me smile.