And it's not even a movie.

Honestly - if you're gonna do a post-Next Gen thriller about Romulan politics, brisk action, and cold blue vengeance, this is how to do it. And if Abrams' flick is literally half this good, it'll be the best Trek flick since '91 by a country mile. What's really odd about Countdown is how well it seems to fit: it doesn't ignore or undo the Next Gen movies in any way (except for bringing Data back from the dead); it fully absorbs their emotional temperature and extends it, as if to say "yeah, those stories sucked. But the world is still viable for storytelling." What I'm about to say could not possibly have been the writers' intent, but... it actually even eats away at the logic of rebooting the Trek franchise altogether. Why go back in time, when the stories in the existing continuity can be this good? Ever forward, as the guy who played Chang said in that Dragnet movie.

Well frick. I'm all kerfuzzled now.

On the other side of the nerd spectrum I finally got around to watching the second episode of Dollhouse, in advance of this week's ep which is reputed by all to actually be "the one that is good." Well it better be. The premise remains as baffling as last time (why do these clients need the dolls? why?), but I'll tell ya what the real missing link is here: this is the first Joss Whedon series (actually, possibly the first Joss Whedon anything) without a single bit of humour about its own idea. There are comic characters on the show and the occasional one-liner, but there is absolutely no self-importance-deflating self-reflexivity around the ridiculousness of the concept. I can buy vampire slayers and space cowboys, as long as they occasionally realize how lunatic their concept is. This crew? Boring as a trip to the dentist. At this point I feel a fascination coming on - I am downloading further episodes, even now - but for now it's the fascination of seeing how and what and frick is going on here, that something this lackluster made it to air.

Man. When television was good. Remember? X-Files and Buffy and Six Feet Under and E.R.? And now True Blood and Dollhouse and... E.R.? (OH MY GOD, THE REUNION EPISODE. OH MY GOD.) I'd take a warmed-over episode of Alias over this shit any day.

Posted by tederick at 5:59 PM in comix & joss & tv
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From: Matthew Brown
To: Sandy
Subject: What's wrong with Carter

Haven't watched this week's episode yet (don't have cable) but here's what I think based on last week's.

- Something is wrong with Carter's sole remaining kidney. (He lost the other one when he got stabbed.) He is going to get a new kidney.

- Dr. Peter Benton will be called in to perform the transplant.

- The operation will succeed but over the following weeks Carter will get sick. The kidney did not take.

- Carter will die and donate his heart to that woman with no heart. (Carter has type O blood.)

- Dr. Douglas Ross and Nurse Hathaway will be in town to attend his funeral but will perform heroic medical acts when something bad happens i.e. a boy gets trapped in a well and then a train crashes into that well carrying Ewan McGregor.

- Alternately, when he finds out Carter is dying, Dr. Ross will gather the other doctors and say "No. Not him. Not this man." Ross, Hathaway, Benton, Lewis and Weaver will go on a kill-crazy rampage across Chicago, slaughtering person after person in an effort to find Carter a new kidney. Donald Anspaugh will come out of retirement. The bald, pissed-off ghost of Mark Greene will be summoned. Deb Chen will show up, dressed as a ninja, with six kidneys in each hand and the blood of her victims all over her face. THEY WILL SUCCEED, Chief. They will save Carter's life. When they are brought before a tribunal to answer for their heinous crimes, the Mayor of Chicago will grant them all pardons, "because it's Carter," he will say. "Because John Carter is the best of all of us." Also because it turns out the Mayor used to sleep with Carter's grandmother.

Now tell me you don't love that ending.

- M

Posted by tederick at 2:59 PM in tv
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I have an uneasy relationship with Lost this season. Longtime readers will remember that I've had similar periods before, so I almost feel foolish about it; at the end of most episodes this year I feel relieved, "See, that wasn't so bad," as though some weight of crapulence has descended on the show and is only barely being lifted on a weekly basis. Something about the storytelling just rubs me wrong, right now. With the long-questioned flashback structure negated at last, the show seems rushed, and vacant, and hard to follow. There's too much going on. Jack - who is still, as far as I'm concerned, the hero of the series - has been sidelined to day-player status until this week's episode, when he finally seemed to become the lead again; but in doing so, we went no further than that, or no deeper. It's as though with 4 seasons of character relationships set up, the writers have decided "Well, you know enough about them now; let's just see them act, rather than be." If each season prior has defined itself with a core thrust - the island, the hatch, the Others, the freighter - and this one is "the time travel"... well, it's either unaccountably daring that they have reformulated the structure of the show to so closely approximate the time-jumping island on which our characters reside, or it's just plain madness. Each episode comes with held breath. I wonder how the season as a whole will feel on Blu-Ray.

This piece, in which Ebert eulogizes Gene Siskel on the 10th anniversary of his death, is predictably lovely.

To further cover off the backlog, I didn't like Dollhouse really very much at all. The pre-show expectations hold true: this show is not appealing. It doesn't have a premise. It doesn't have a main character, and it doesn't have, really, an idea of any kind at all. Or at least that's how it feels, given how spectacularly badly thought out the pilot was. Can someone explain to me: why, if your daughter was kidnapped and you needed a hostage negotiator, you would (instead of hiring an actual hostage negotiator) hire someone who had been mentally programmed to think they're a hostage negotiator? Was that covered somewhere, and I missed it? I don't understand what advantage the Dollhouse presents, in any of the engagements depicted in the first episode. If you wanted a high-price whore to spend your birthday weekend with, why go to the additional expense and trouble of a mind-programmed prostitute, rather than a real prostitute? Just so she can race bikes? Why send a tactical operative into a safehouse who has never actually held a gun before, but only thinks she has? This pilot is proof that you can't actually develop an entire series concept in the bathroom while waiting for the fish course to arrive. Oddly enough, with a 13-episode order and a million-and-change bump on viewership from Sarah Connor an hour before, it might survive to the summertime, and lord knows, that first season of Buffy was crappy too. But it wasn't stupid. The first episode of Dollhouse is stupid.

Posted by tederick at 8:54 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & ebert & joss & tv
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George Clooney is going back to the E.R.

The Mark Greene flashback-but-everyone's-fatter episode was so hackneyed I couldn't help but love it, and now I'm throwing down and calling for a full-on Abramstrek reboot of E.R. Come on - none of the originals are on the show any more, and that, uh, sucks. Boot it back, oldschool! Have the rest of this "final" season take place in 1994, when we still cared about this shit! Have other notables from the television landscape of that era (Sipowicz, Mulder, funny Homer Simpson) show up too! Why not? You telling me Joey Tribiani wouldn't make a hilarious E.R. patient? That a surgery scene could not be improved with the liberal addition of a little Kramer? Hell, bring those bastards from Chicago Hope aboard, too! We need doctors! Address Ally McBeal's anorexia in a 2-part "very special Blossom"... or Felicity! And while we're at it, let's have Ewan McGregor do his entire guest-spot over again. Put Carol back in that convenience store with a gun to her head, have Chloe running around crazy, George Clooney can save that kid from the drainpipe exactly like he did it before. Give an episode to Quentin Tarantino, and another one to explain just what the fuck happened to Dr. Div Cvetic. (He ended up on the Lost island, obviously.) I WANT IT ALL. Give it to me.

Whoa. These meds are fucking me up.

Posted by tederick at 11:48 AM in tv
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I've said this before and I'll say it again, the only real problem I have with winter is the quantity and weight of the armour. I just walked from my place to Bay and Dundas and back, and I am frickin' wiped and my back hurts. Hey: while we're on the subject of stuff I've said before, the retail industry can/must self-destruct within the next decade. I can't remember the last time I went to a chain store to buy something, and actually found it on the shelves; nor can I remember the last time I walked into a chain store and didn't find them blowing out merchandise at bargain-basement prices to clear room that they can no longer afford to clog. The methodology of stocking and then selling items in a large-scale environment just doesn't make sense in the new economic landscape. (Nor does ordering everything online, unfortunately, due to environmental impacts.) I guess that means the real answer is: stop buying shit altogether. Which the econopocalypse will, of course, shortly make viable. Woot for our team!

The good news is, the rest of the world might be falling apart, but I can now command 80% predictability accuracy on the scramble crossing at Dundas Square.

I went to see The Fly last night, not the Jeff Goldblum one, the Vincent Price one, although Vincent Price is barely in it and certainly doesn't get turned into a giant fly which would be awesome. ([Vincent Price voice] I'mmmmm a giiiiiiiiiant flyyyyyyyyy!!![/Vincent Price voice]) Not to take anything away from the Jeff Goldblum one, but if they ever wanted to make another remake of that flick, they should try to adapt the original story - because it's crazy. The thing starts with a berserk Montrealer getting his wife to squash the parts of his body that have turned into fly, and then proceeds to observe Vincent Price wheedling the backstory out of the wife for about 20 minutes, at which point the entire picture goes into flashback for an hour where we learn the terrible tale of how the man knew that his telepods did whacky shit like reversing the writing on his "Made in Japan" dinner plates, but thought he'd give human teleportation a go anyway and turned into a table-thumping rum-sucking freak. (Now that, my friends, is a run-on sentence.) But I guess in 1958 (Back When We Weren't Jaded) if you were going to see a movie called The Fly, you really would wait through an entire movie for five minutes of a dude running around with a fly-head at the end of the picture. That was thrilling enough, and you left satisfied, because you a) believed the illusion, and b) had never seen anything so freaky in your damn life. If, on the other hand, a 1958 audience had to put up with Jeff Goldblum puke-aciding on Stathis Borens' foreleg, I think they'd all have six-month hairy conniptions and retire to bed without supper.

My lady love has been ill for the past few days so I have spent much of my time hanging out on her couch-bed watching Ugly Betty, or UgBet for short. We watched about half of the second season, enough time for me to go through the entire cycle of starting to wish I were gay and pretty, actually wishing I were gay and pretty, and then no longer really wanting to be gay or pretty but being happy just being me. As a series, UgBet is perfect for days like this, because it is attractive and undemanding and fun. (Like me!) But lord goodness gracious, I can't waits till Lost, and may order the shinybluthirdseason on teh intrawebs, just to be sated.

Round about when Harvey's got the gun to Gary Oldman's kid's head, it's time to go home.

Posted by tederick at 1:37 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & movies & the apocalypse & tv
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In the Kirk Cameron have-you-broken-a-Commandment test, I am ten for ten. YES! I have defied all of god's laws! This is a lovely gloss on Cap'n Malcolm Reynolds' line quoted above. I am as filthy sinful as it's possible to be, even if being so requires hanging my commission of murder and adultery upon defining murder (as the bible does) as having even a moment's hatred in your heart, and defining adultery (as the bible does) as ever having lusted after a woman, at all. Fuck, if that's the definition, I have committed adultery just by looking at my own girlfriend when she got on the train just now. (She's cute.) I cheated on her with... her. Way to go!

Today was one of those days they warn you about when they tell you not to sell out to "The Man." Phone never stopped ringing. Wall-to-wall meetings. Benefits claim rejected. Overdue invoice got sent to the wrong place. And so forth. God is aware of my sins, and he is comin' at me! HALLELUJAH.

I'm watching The Long Way Down, which is the sequel to The Long Way Round, which is the continued adventures of Charlie Boorman and Ewan McGregor on motorcycles around the world. This time, Ewan=no beard. It's sort of the perfect life, isn't it. Be an actor, become well off enough that you can afford and organize a massive 10-man expedition across the planet, go and tape it and have the world's best-produced home movie to watch in your rocker when you're a hundred and eight. Not a bad life. I've been thinking a lot lately about sustainability and where it's all going and what we're all supposed to be doing, and I guess chugging around the planet on a diesel engine isn't really useful along those lines, but then neither is sitting here, doing this. It's excess traded for excess, and I bet on a highway in Zambia, even burning through dinosaurs, you're probably on balance eating less of the world than I am right now. And there, there's wide open spaces and a sense of direction. Here everything's vertical.

Posted by tederick at 10:36 PM in j-o-b & jedi antics & obi-wan kenobi & the apocalypse & tv
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Hey, you ever have that thing where you just got out of the shower and you take a call on your cell and when you're done you realize your cell is completely soaked because your beard was still full of absorbed water? Cuz I have.

Listen: internet: last night Sarafina and I couldn't sleep at around 5 in the morning so we got out of bed and watched The Golden Girls on DVD. Recommend. It sure messed up the next few hours when my body just couldn't seem to do the math on how much accumulated sleep it had actually received, but it was still just about the pleasantest time you can have with four old ladies at any hour of the day, and especially the pre-dawn hour.

DAMMIT - the link I was going to link to right here, which was really the meat of this post, has apparently been removed. Well now the wind's gone right out of the thing.

I was going to spend today doing various miscellaneous admin and working on Guy in the Sky, but after being kicked around more than a bit by the week just past, I am instead going to do what I do best: indulge.

Posted by tederick at 11:18 AM in foodin' & tv
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Of leukemia, yesterday morning. Only met her once, but she was a grand, brassy lady. Kind of like what I want to be like when I'm 76 (only a dude) (but definitely also the voice of the computer on Star Trek).

Posted by tederick at 10:52 AM in tv
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In case you were worried that between Iron Man and Dark Knight, comic book movies were just getting too awesome this year, The Spirit is here. She's a good mother.

Holy. Moly.

I spent the entirety of the day - I mean, literally blocked off the calendar, sat away from the computer and ignored email, went through (and created) pages and pages of notes - planning. Planning for every single rock and eddy that's coming my way at work in the next 12 months. Creating strategy, building business cases, allocating resources, boiling down major objectives into teensy tiny tactics. Y'know what (unsurprisingly)? One day didn't sack it. So I'm gonna have to do more of it, as things continue to gliss down over the course of the holidays. But I got a substantial amount done today, enough so that I actually feel less than completely worthless. (I mean... wait... what? Good. I feel good.) Boy, sometimes you come around the turn on those double negatives and you're flying out of control through a guardrail and into a lake. And the lake is meat.

Now all I have to do is book the sixteen different holiday social events, and I'm made out of stars.

Anyone who wants to know what Bea Arthur looks like now can go over here, because the grand old lady has finally been inducted into the TV Hall of Fame, emphasis on grand old lady. Those hands. Wowahs. Anyways, I guess now I will literally never get to see Bea Arthur in person and I will spend the rest of my days kicking myself for not going to see her one-woman show back in '04. I am a mighty, mighty fool.

Those pics of Angela Lansbury (same page) made me remember to tell you that I am no longer calling my band Jessica Fletcher. It will now be called Queen's Royal Starship.

Posted by tederick at 5:28 PM in j-o-b & movies & tv
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Do you ever want nothing so much as to go home, drink rum, and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

"...but you don't, because you're in a hospital, with resuscitating equipment!!!" - Dorothy Zbornack

Posted by tederick at 2:26 PM in j-o-b & the rum diaries & tv
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I worked from home today, and as is often the case while doing so, I put in a DVD of ER and let it run in the background while I performed my miscellaneous inane tasks. Only this time, one of the eps on the disk was that one - the scariest hour of television I ever saw. It's the episode where they kill Lucy, and it remains a legitimate masterpiece in the filmic craft of creating seemingly unbearable suspense by delaying the gratification of knowledge that the audience has, but the characters do not have.

At the end of the previous episode, Lucy and Carter have been stabbed by a knife-wielding schizophrenic whose condition worsened while in the ER. The incident took place during the Valentine's Day party, and the loud music prevented anyone else on the staff from hearing their cries for help. Now, at the beginning of this episode, we know that Lucy and Carter are in one of the examination rooms and dying, but nobody else in the ER does. Then, in what I still consider to be a storycraft masterstroke, the entire first act of the episode unfolds around the outside of the room that Lucy and Carter are in - the camera almost uniformly pointing towards the room, past oblivious characters who do not yet realize that their friends are bleeding to death just on the other side of the walls they are standing beside. The room, and its occupants, are the key point of the story and so the room is given visual priority in every frame. And for about 6 unbroken minutes, the other characters find every single conceivable reason not to go into that room. It's maddening. I still remember watching that episode with my sister the first time it aired, and I'm pretty sure by the end of act one we were actually screaming at the TV. I still get chills thinking about it. Not bad from a nighttime soap that was, even then, a few years past its prime and is, nowadays, utterly irrelevant to the television landscape it still vaingloriously inhabits. They made a casual Lucy ref a few episodes ago when Maura Tierney finally left the series, and I was left thinking, "yeah, even 9 years later they've still pretty much never done better than that."

What a fabulous little episode.

Posted by tederick at 5:29 PM in tv
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Hey! It's Thanksgiving. The one day of the year (that isn't Christmas) (or my birthday) where I don't just wanna be a carnivore, I wanna prove shit. Be a fundamentalist about the affair. Right now my brain is in a single staccato repeat of "bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird bird." When word reached my ear of a friend of Sarafina's making a turducken the other day, I wanted to make my way there just to encounter it, just to see what it smells like. I didn't get there. But apparently sausage is involved - apparently "turkducken" is an underexaggeration. It's actually turduckenage. I sort of want to see a turkduckenage take on a tofurkey at some sort of Caligula dinner party. Don't worry: I want to be fair about things. I want that tofurkey to sing tofurkey awesomeness. It's the excess that attracts me, not the culinary philosophical contretemps. And then I just want to see those two balls of opposing gustatorial confection - the height of their respective antithetical branches of a food industry's technological brow - meet each other on a playfield of decadence, to see what happens.

Yesterday napping and last-of-the-season long weekend sunshine was taken to a high art form, and then I drove the sisters DiFelice to B-fo

HOLY SHIT THE DEVIL JUST WALKED IN

THAT'S THE DEVIL

He looks like an average white guy, slightly overweight, could be shopping at a Wal Mart in Pennsylvania, except he has horns and is wandering around the room right now looking out the windows

The devil.

Anyway, - wow, real life intervened there for a second, walked around a Starbucks and threw me off my shit, I'll be right with you -

OK. So I drove the sisters DiFelice to B-fo last night for the long weekend, and I've got my family affairs later today. The place still feels strange when it's just me there alone, kept trying to hug Zam all night while in the throes of listless sleep, but I got up in the morning and embraced bachelorhood, ate Pop Tarts and wrote about action figures and watched the last of season 1 of Californication a little bit high. You know, that show turned faintly tremendous toward the end there, or at least as close to as it's likely to get, because there's no denying I just cared so much when that little whelp stole his manuscript. Perhaps I am sensitive to plagiarism, artistic thievery, and not getting to claim the awesomeness that is yours. (Remember when that kid stole my web site back in '01?) But yeah, those last three episodes or so when suddenly the good guys (Mulder, McElhone, Bendis, and the potty-mouthed and stone-cold-stoned lesbicurious Brazilian waxer Marcy who is, in her way, the funniest character on earth to me right now) were very much a unfocused, disspirited mess, but the bad guys (ho-girl and ho-secretary) were lining up to be all evil and whatnot, and even that stupid Wednesday Adams daughter seems terribly effective all of a sudden and I sorta had to sit on my new grey Ikea couch-that's-a-bed-also and say "Yeah, apparently this works" cuz I'm just so agitated about everything.

And now it's nearly 1 and I would very much like a sandwich, except that I would also like to be hungry later, and I would very much like to be out in the sun reading comics, except that I'd like to write something first and laptops work in sunshine like vampires work in... sunshine. (Shit.) But in the meantime, I am thankful for every single thing in my little life. And gratitude is success.

Posted by tederick at 12:47 PM in foodin' & jedi antics & tv
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A tiny, vicious-looking miniature helicopter would go nicely with my trebuchet, don't you think? I could send out sorties into the rest of the office, lure enemies back to my desk with the promise of RC helicopterin' fun, and then hit them with a fusillade of trebuchet-flung hellfire. But I don't trust ThinkGeek any more, not since the Venus Flytrap incident of 2006, which was admittedly my own fault for thinking that the climate in Toronto was somehow equivalent to that of Buenos Aires, but I blame ThinkGeek nevertheless. Because I'm a dork.

• Plush zombie with mix-and-match zombie parts ooooh!
• No reason not to have the headpiece to the Staff of Ra on one's keychain.

Sarafina and I took a lap around the Spaced block last night, with delicious foods to go along with, and she's also working her way through the first season of Lost rather ravenously, which has made me want to go back and watch the whole thing all over again, or at least get to December quickly so I can watch Season 4 when it comes out on the DVD. The dino-natives are restless.

Television programs I apparently no longer watch:

• House
• The Simpsons
• Pushing Daisies

Television programs I continue to watch in spite of myself:

• Sookie Stackhouse or whatever the fuck it's called

Thus returning us to my long-held, little-believed assertion that I don't watch TV any more.

Posted by tederick at 9:46 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & dr. house & dr. jones & miscellaneous crap & simps & tv & zombies
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That's me.

Yeah, I used to own the Palisades Mr. Brown from many a moon ago (back when there was a Palisades Toys, of course), but Zam pretty much destroyed mine over the past few years. I found a replacement at a stupendous bargain on Ebay last week, so Quentin Tarantino is pointing a gun at me once again. It used to force me to write; now, at least, it keeps me honest.

Hey speaking of fun shit you can do with shit, here's a woman dressed up as a Cookie Monster Slayer. Now, if it was me, that would not be red blood on the stake - it would be either bright blue, or uncooked cookie dough with chunks of blue fur sticking out of it. (Probably the latter.) Me, I always liked Telly. I think there should be Telly action figures. I think Telly and Mr. Brown would look quite good together, actually, and if you stick General Madine in there, you pretty much seal the deal.

Today was the day I got everything in the mail that was supposed to come to me, over the past five weeks. All at once. Most important of all was the replacement for my camcorder adapter, because somehow in the moving shuffle I actually lost the old one. I thought that only happened on TV, but it made me feel stupendously stupid and impotent nonetheless, and reminded me rather violently of my responsibilities to myself on a creative level. Nonetheless, although I do not feel very well today (physically), I (otherwise) feel full and wonderful and very, very thankful. (Hey, five days early!) So that's good. Fall's a good time to do a thing.

"Personality-wise, Telly is a fidgeting, nervous wreck, prone easily to manic behavior and paranoia."

Posted by tederick at 3:05 PM in miscellaneous crap & toys! & tv
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What we did not realize until recently was that quietly growing in Sarafina's back yard over the course of the summer, deceptively coy in their cheerful redness, were in fact the Insanity Peppers of Quetzlzacatenango, which are nominally grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum. We bought the seeds at the Party Farms near her house. Who knew? Suddenly bereft of my Thursday night plans I decided to make tacos, tossed in a single such insanity pepper because I've yet to find suitable chili flakes at a grocery store near my house, and found the resulting taco stuffing virtually inedible due to its extraordinary, tongue-flaying heat. Gulping spoonfuls of plain yogourt I was able to survive, but it was a harrowing ordeal. I made it through the third episode of True Blood and the sixth of Californication, and then passed out, as high as a Christmas-tree pie.

Neither series, incidentally, is what I would call "good." The former is turning into a guiltily enjoyable trash novel (kind of a Southern Gothic Melrose Place with fangs) and the latter is just some sweet pimpin' Duchovny porn (ironic, no?), so it's not like I'm not rabidly enjoying them; just that my enjoyment comes with snide attitude and above-it-all arrogance. As it should.

Once Upon a Time in the North is making me ache quite a bit, but otherwise I'm enthusiastically adoring it; it was exactly what I needed, being an adventure story featuring cowboys and bears. Cowboys are dead interesting when transplanted into unfamiliar climes. (And re: young Lee Scoresby, I have but two words: Nathan. Fillion.) I'm on page 50 and doing my best not to run through the whole thing at a gallop, but so far it's my favourite book of the year. I suppose that wasn't surprising.

It is chilly as a son'bitch in Toronto, and Nuit Blanche is tomorrow night. This year's philosophy is "pick a zone, stick to that zone." But which zone?

Posted by tederick at 9:08 AM in books & foodin' & tv
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Who would win in a fight, Captain Hector Barbossa of the Pirates of the Caribbean, or Captain Christopher Pike of the Starship Enterprise?

(Think of it like an updated version of Angel and Spike's astronauts vs. cavemen argument, but don't make the mistake Chris made of thinking that astronauts would win just cuz they're fancy and evolved. Fuck, now I want to watch 2001.)

Posted by tederick at 10:57 AM in pirates & tv
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Man, I stop watching Letterman and something this awesome happens!

By the way, I don't know if you've noticed, but Jack Layton sure can pronounce the hell out of the word "parliament."

Posted by tederick at 9:04 AM in goddamn politics & tv
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I finally caught up with the first episode of True Blood last night. It was really all over the place. Certainly the worst directing job Alan Ball ever did, though that's not a long list; especially in the first 20 minutes or so, which made me wonder if he'd come out with a massively overlong rough cut (not 5 or 10 minutes over, mind you, more like 30) and needed to pare down everything that wasn't a ludicrously on-the-nose line of expositional dialogue. Anyways, there were still things in the episode that I liked. I'm downloading the second now, but have little patience with the affair overall.

Meanwhile, disregarding the hodgepodge of news and rumours about Johnny Depp's upcoming Disney slate over here, we still arrive at the thing where he showed up at the event dressed in his complete Jack Sparrow costume with hair and makeup (and, one might imagine, a bit of swagger). [reaction] !!! [/reaction]

Oh, apparently they're making Pirates of the Caribbean 4.

(made it all the way to the end of the post without swooning)

Posted by tederick at 8:30 AM in movies & pirates & tv
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"It's crack cream. You put it on your crack." - Matthew Price

ITEM!: I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever shoulda tried to go without internet in the home. The wi-fi signals in my building are locked up tighter than... uh... tight... things. But why complain, Matt? Well, in spite of my bravura technology-couldn't-possibly-be-that-important stance (and yours too), it's surprising just how much daily information you need to get off teh intrawebs. I'm not talkin' no Facebook email mumbo here, I'm talking simple stuff like where to go if you're bleeding from the head, or want a copy of Final Fantasy III. Fortunately, I have set myself up to have internet installed sometime early next week, whereupon I can finally start downloading some TV, which is the other thing I never shoulda given up.

ITEM!: I never shoulda cut all my hair off, either. As much as the long hair was driving me insane, the short hair is making me really, really sad. Who knew? I guess my internal image of myself changed sometime this year.

ITEM!: 175 emails upon my return. Pitiful.

ITEM!: Yesterday with my ladyfriend was pretty much the best day ever, from neck to nuts. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'm doin' ok with that.

ITEM!: Things my house needs: soap tray, bath mat, chairs, a sofa (on order), plants, pots and pans, steamer trunk, framed Japanese Prestige poster, the internet, scratching post, a personality

ITEM!: Burn After Reading is rather tremendous, if puzzling; the flick fucking ends like a slap in the face and I would say it had done so too soon, were I not completely unable to figure out a single storyline, character arc, or plot element that had not actually been satisfactorily resolved at the moment the credits rolled. It feels a little like a magic trick, or more accurately, a game of three-card monte, but I respect the deftness with which I was tricked.

"I'm not set up to mold hard rubber." - Harry Pfarrer

Posted by tederick at 3:32 PM in 1701 & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & movies & tv
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MA!!!!

In other capsule news:

• Stop the George Lucas, I want to get off.
• Ultimate Extreme Steve 3 running late. Because he's ultimate.
• Mamoversary show - and it's a doozy - should be posted today. Mamo Facebook page in effect: please join.
• I have a love ninja button on my pants.

Posted by tederick at 9:52 AM in galaxy far & podcastery & tv
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True Blood poster!

Ironically enough it premieres seven days after the long-awaited glory of Matt permanently ending his relationship with Rogers. Oh man howdy, am I looking forward to that phone call. Cancelling the cable, the internet, the phone, the everything, and when asked why, responding "because of how awful each and every one of you has been to me over the past five years. Even your fucking phone-answering robot. That's why." It'll be the victorious conclusion of my 14-month tangle with Fido all over again...

Posted by tederick at 9:28 AM in tv
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I don't know how or why I was fortunate enough to stumble on Vampire Ecstasy while killing time tonight, but god-diggity, it's sensational. Right now the dark vampire babes are making sweet lesbianic love to the last of the blonde virgins, having successfully seduced her might-be-a-vampire / Angel-prototype boyfriend. Gonna have to put together a Vampire Ecstasy / Scream Blacula Scream double feature this summer, or at least listen to "Cry Little Sister" while walking around the house with a candle.

They are compelling the lusts of the blonde virgin with the power of their vampire chanting!!! She is stroking her own boobies by command of a will stronger than her own! Marvelous.

Anyways. Sarafina and I had Prisoner Day this weekend; we got through the first 4 disks in an afternoon of luxurious stay-in-bedness. Now I'm scrambling to find a copy of "Dreamy Party"... love that track, and the sweet muscular mindfuck that goes along with it.

I watched this week's Lost tonight, and I continue firmly in my belief that Season 4 is playing fair all of the hopes and expectations of every single episode that lead up to now. This section of the narrative just fucking rocks. Even the weak episodes (Juliet; Kate) are a damn sight stronger than half the episodes in seasons 1, 2, and 3. And this week's Benry Galinus opus was just magnificent, both cementing Ben further into the center of the entire clockwork, and doing some pretty terrific supporting work with Sayid to boot. I don't really give a fuck about how or why anything is happening any more (I thought the island was behind boat time, not ahead of it?), but give me a gun-crazy Sawyer going all manly-rescue on a missing Claire-bear and I am a happy panda. Everything's falling into place...

Posted by tederick at 10:35 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & movies & tv
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Using the PowerPuff Portrait Studio! Man, they've got a portrait studio for everything now. What's next? Elvis?

Posted by tederick at 11:28 AM in tv
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Appreciate some Riker, people!

Posted by tederick at 2:34 PM in tv
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I think I am going to start signing all of my emails with "I am not a lady." Not my personal emails mind you; my work emails. I think this will let me "go places."

I'm reading Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 17 yes SEVEN FRICKING TEEN, and it is the last one I will need to read to have actually gone through the entirety of the Bendis run to date on this thing. Believe me, if I'd known when I picked up vol. 1 waythehellbackintheday that I'd be into the late teens before I was done, I would not have started trying to back-fill at all. The current issues are just as good as the old issues. Still, in case I haven't made it clear, this is one hell of a comic book. This volume (Clone Saga) rocks, the Carnage arc was tremendous, and on the whole the entire deal just tickles me pink and makes me like Spider-Man. So that is, without being "cool" in the traditional sense, at least worthwhile.

As I think I've mentioned previously, I also rather enjoy The Prestige. This morning I amused myself once again by envisioning an alterna-version of The Prestige where the third act reveal is that there's actually a character named the Prestige, who has been manipulating the entire series of events from behind the scenes. In this morning's musings, the action of the film then shifted to the 22nd century where Batman and Wolverine fought each other to the death in magical robot suits. There's really no end to the potential imaginative real estate of The Prestige.

Anyways, I just found out that the 8-10 week ship time for those free blu-ray disks was woefully optimistic; I'm not expecting my gratis copy of shiny blu Prestige until around about the first of May. Motherfuckers win the format war, and suddenly we're all expendable! Dang. The good news (nay, best news ever) is that Batman Be Blu-Ray come July 8, in many different fancy packages. What I don't get is, why doesn't the blu-ray special edition come with the Batman flash drive that the regular-def special edition comes with? Them's monkey dealin's.

Anthony Minghella is dead? WTF? It's been a long time since I've seen The English Patient and I never saw Ripley, but the man wrote every single episode of The Storyteller and that makes him a god among insects. Bow!

Posted by tederick at 1:41 PM in batman! & comix & j-o-b & movies & shinybludisks & tv
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Strikewatch: day! It's over. Kinda. Whatever. You know, this whole thing really was like that Simpsons episode where TV went away and everyone went outside. I watched a couple of episodes of House back to back last night which was, aside from the two new episodes of Lost, the first time I've watched network TV since November. It felt strange and unusual, and I began to get a glimmer of the feeling of what it would be like to not watch television at all. Not so bad. If those episodes of House (and Lost) weren't so darned scintillating, I'd say to hell with the whole thing.

Now let's gripe about Indy IV. When I found out that Shia LaBeouff's character's name was Mutt, I started to feel like really, we all oughta just not go see this movie at all. I mean, I know we will. But think about what we're putting on the line here: I genuinely love all three of the flicks, albeit in completely different ways apiece. How much would it suck to just have to deal with the fact that the fourth one was jive, with characters named Mutt in it? All right, it's the most obvious point to make. But it was really drilling into me over the past few days. My jacket's in the UK, the Sideshow announcement is coming soon, I've got Last Crusade spinning in my DVD player right now. I love me the Indy. I don't want change.

Had a terrific day which involved, in no particular order, watching the last great Tim Burton movie (cuz fuck Tim Burton!), welcoming D-Coc and B-Gold back from G-ny, eating cold chicken, and lolling around in bed for like a near-criminal quantity of hours. If all days were like this, I'd need no other sustenance.

Posted by tederick at 12:11 AM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & dr. house & dr. jones & tv
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Who has my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (book)? Cuz one of you does, and I want it back.

Oscar nominations are the usual list of toldjaso's, likesay Cate Blanchett getting nominated for Elizabeth and I'm Not There, Johnny picking up his Sweeney nomination, and Ellen Page getting the inevitable actress nod. My feeling of Atonement dread was nicely lessened by the lack of a director nom; the Juno support is heartening, and it'll be hilarious to watch There Will Be Blood get so utterly snubbed on wins versus the number of nominations it actually got. How Golden Compass stole a visual effects nomination will be a mystery to me until the end of time.

The monster in Cloverfield is a giant space beetle from under the sea. That's fine. It's possible that the writer's strike has actually cured me (and North America) of our collective TV addiction; that's fine too. I haven't watched a TV show, or played the Wii, more than once so far in 2008. There's just so much other stuff to do. And this is winter: can you imagine if the doors got blown open and we could all go outside and play soccer, sit at cafés, or read comics in the park? Television itself might cease to exist for ever more.

Posted by tederick at 9:24 AM in books & movies & tv & wii
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Apparently, being in class all day makes me hungry, with "hungry" in this case being substituted for something else. This certainly explains the entirety of teen boy culture, anyway. Thank goodness for text messages.

I've come to a rather startling decision, and that decision is: off coffee!! Or at least, hella less coffee. I have been feeling increasing quantities of crappy for the past couple of weeks while downing my perennial Starbuckses; and as per back in the fourth year at York, they're not so much waking me up as putting me in a coma. It's time for a change. It's time for large, flavoursome mint teas. Mmmmm. Sure, I slept through the afternoon, but at least my insides don't hurt.

I got Banacek in the mail today. I am particularly looking forward to episode 8, "The Two Million Clams of Captain Jack." (Jack: so many clams!) I also got Oldboy on Blu-Ray, which leads to today's nicest phrase (and current Facebook status): Blu-Ray hammer fight. Sure, I can't buy Zodiac (yet). But who cares?

Strongly suspecting I need to locate a Rubik's Magic and figure out what the deal was with that thing. There could be e.learning implications.

Posted by tederick at 5:53 PM in foodin' & j-o-b & shinybludisks & toys! & tv
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Chris got me the new My So-Called Life boxed set for Christmas, which I guess now replaces my old My So-Called Life boxed set, battles won notwithstanding. Really, sentimentalizing DVDs must be my worst feature. Or at least, the worst of my many "I oversentimentalize ________" bad features. (My nose still sucks more.) Well anyways, I'm glad to go up to v2.0 on this thing. It looks good, the essays in the book actually made me feel like a teenager again, and right now I'm eating pizza and watching the show on "play all," which is apt given how much I've been feeling like a stupid teenager lately anyway. It's a little piece of happy.

The booklet, by the way, opens with exactly what Winnie Holzman was going to do for season 2, which I've spent thirteen years studiously avoiding. (And it doesn't suck.) Oh well. I'll not spoil it, for those still hangin' on. So much fanfic rests on not knowing!

You know, I know it wasn't the sixties or nothin', but I was thinking yesterday while listening to some Nirvana and wearing a lumberjack shirt (OK, not the latter) that I'm fairly content to have been a teenager in the 1990s. We had our fair share of moral borderlands to conquer, and we did all right. The music didn't suck and the clothes weren't thoroughly embarrassing. The movies coulda been better, I guess. But yeah: good decade to call my own.

Posted by tederick at 6:07 PM in shinydisks & tv
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"Hey Berle! You know what you're doing wrong? You're standing too close to the audience!" - Statler
"How far back do you want me to go?" - Milton Berle
"You got a car?" - Statler

I'm still sort of fucked up by the fact that when I was a kid, I had Statler and Waldorf backwards. Honestly: doesn't Statler look a whole lot more like a Waldorf? Everything about him from demeanor to eyebrow length says "Waldorf" to me. Shit now I'm starting to freak out.

As for me, I'm hardly eating and I'm rarely sleeping. And yet I live. When I put on my brown hoodie this morning, I looked in the mirror and said "hmmm... cloakier than usual." I know I'm in there somewhere, but you can't tell from the outside. Anyways, I'm sure it'll even out sooner or later, and when it does I'll eat a whole bushel of apples. Till then, I'm unslakeable.

Speaking of things that I am. I don't know what makes me queasier: that the second page specifically references Jason, or that its thing about the "if X then Y" approach to dating so painfully describes my last first date. It would be lovely if anything that I do were not being done by a bajillion other like-inclined losers around the world. Must I wear eyeliner every day? Shiesh.

Posted by tederick at 12:14 PM in miscellaneous crap & tv & zam!
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