Okay, chapter thirteen of Fables was not only way too meta (I felt insulted in places and turning Bigby into a chimpanzee and a donkey and a beribboned little kid was not fun to watch even if there did turn out to be a backstory-relevant point to it) but it also hammered out a few things about the universe that were better off left vague, like the exact relationship between the Fables and the stories about them. Mostly, though, I was all revved up about the Mister Dark storyline and this all felt like a big distraction.

Legend of the Teaker, season two, episode ten. Kahlan's new furniture store has been beset by thugs so that—okay now.

Funny how all these places, Hartland, Aydindril, the Old World, are all supposed to be really far apart but people in one storyline are able to walk across them in the same amount of time that it takes their friends in another part of the storyline to walk up a hill. The books were sleazy but they did have a concept of travel time. Book!Richard's journey with Verna takes weeks.

( Perdition )

The good thing about this episode is that it left me eager to find out what happens next.

...Does this bring the number of amnesia episodes up to three or does "Home" not count?

Okay, it might be that I'm ticked off about other things, but I don't like the opening of this last ep of Bones. Upon seeing a horned skeleton aflame on the altar, the priest might have said a prayer or two, but he'd call the fire department first. And he wouldn't act like some medieval rube in front of the skeptics; he'd acknowledge and then state his own position. And since when do we forget that Bones does believe in evil?!

( GYAAAAH )

Legend of the Phreaker season two, episode nine. By judicious use of Van Eck Phreaking, Richard has tapped into Darken Rahl's private laptop in search of state secrets, but the horrors of his porn screen saver are not for the faint of heart!

( Heyyyy the title of this one is just like the last one except the opposite. DEEP. )

Just in case the whining confuses anyone, I am actually having a great deal of fun with this.

Legend of the Creaker, season two, episode eight. Richard's new arthritis medicine is the hit of the cruise! But the side-effects are killer.


( Light )

Stolen from katmorning:

Because I have this strange curiosity to know if this many people even read my journal ...

The first TEN five, let's not push it people to comment in this post get to request a drabble from me. In return, they have to post this in their journalno you don't. I don't care. Though, since I know a lot of you are busy busy ... Post it if you feel like it. Or you could make icons, do drawings, anything else you want to pay it forward. (Not like I'm going to check up on it!)

I'm open to try anything I've seen/read. Just no slash/yaoi/yuri, please. Wouldn't even know where to start with that. Otherwise? Prompt me!

You may ask for anything but I will interpret your request as I see fit. So if I decide that Death Note is about a bunch of florists who moonlight as cleaners for the mob, then guess what? Tulips of doom!

A "drabble" is a hundred-word 'fic or scene. Sometimes the author is required to use specific words, but I feel that this just makes them look like completed word puzzles at the end and no fun to read.

not_tragedi: Bella and Jasper bonding
drjmaxwell: Sparklepires on Star Trek
oknazevad: James Bond and the Ninja Turtles
kveldir: J.R.R. Tolkein wakes up in Westeros

I don't mind if the media is exaggerating this one. It is dangerous and should be reversed as soon as possible.

Where are the riots?

My initial reaction to the case of Mr. Freshwater was, "You know what? I don't care if this guy was burning the %#@$in' Mona Lisa into kids' arms; that is freakin' creepy!" But there does seem to be some he-said, she-said to the matter. If it really was just a Tesla experiment that he'd been doing for twenty-one years without objection, then it should be taken off the table.

The real kicker to all of this should be the high-school teacher. If she constantly has to re-teach evolution to the kids who had Mr. Freshwater's eighth-grade science class, then he is not doing an adequate job, regardless of any additional political or religious impropriety that may or may not have happened in his classroom. If such impropriety has been shown to exist, though, that would suggest Mr. Freshwater's evolutionary failings to be deliberate rather than the result of negligence or incompetence.

That being said, teachers should be allowed to keep personal items on their desks and if one of those items happens to be a Bible rather than a wedding photo or a "World's Best Dad" mug, then no one should make an issue of it.

Legend of the Geeker, season two, episode seven. Can Richard and the rest of the mathletes recover the stolen Klingon dictionary before it becomes confetti at the next frat parade—sure fine.

You know, the writing on this show has gotten pretty good. This episode has two major twists that I did not see coming.

( Resurrection )

Support Stacie's January Vampire Author Auction has begun! Stacie Holeman is a woman with two kinds of cancer and no kinds of medical insurance. All proceeds go directly to her medical bills.

I finished reading The Handmaid's Tale today. I'd already seen the film, which is excellent. The filmmakers did a good job of resisting the urge to make the sex scenes sexy and kept them creepy instead. They retained the book's modern, everyday-turned-wrong settings and all the ugly saturated colors from the off-the-rack costumes really hammered it home.

While I was reading it, I found myself wishing that I didn't already know ( certainly spoilery things that I learned during the movie )

Also, the movie completely leaves out that Moira's a lesbian.

When I mentioned that Bones was the Fox Network's attempt to recreate The X-Files, Sis put it very well, "I don't like this show any more. I'm just hangin' with it 'cause we've got history."

WENDELL, YAY!

( The Roswell episode )

An article in Nature today reveals that while we share 99% of our overall genome with chimpanzees, there is one area that has shown startling and significant change in the six or seven million years since the lineages diverged:

The Y chromosome. Yep, the puny underachiever of the chimp chromo gym class has only two-thirds as many gene families and 47% as many protien-coding elements as its bespectacled human counterpart and the content that is there has been rearranged so drastically that it suggests that these spindly chunks of hereditary matter might be tiny, but they can move like the wind.

(headdesk)

(headdesk)

(headdesk)

A four-year-old Texas boy has been suspended from school for horribly and maliciously distracting his classmates

...by growing a ponytail.

Okay, there are two issues here. 1. Why is the Dallas school district bothering to spend its time and money on something so thoroughly trivial? 2. If the kid's parents don't like his haircut choices for any reason then they should just take him for a haircut anyway because he's four. I'm all for allowing kids control over their own bodies, but at this age, it might just be that he thinks there are ghosts in the scissors or something.

Four-day countdown to Support Stacie, you guys. Time to use our nerdly powers to kick cancer's ass!

I know I'm only listed for Underworld, True Blood, Twilight and The Very Adorable Vampire Detective Show I mean Moonlight, but I will write any vampire fandom with which I am familiar except maybe Forever Knight. So if you want Buffy and Angel to come in and kick Edward Cullen's sparkly tuchas, I think that can be arranged. (Sorry, but I haven't seen Daybreakers yet, though if someone gives me an excuse I could manage to make that sacrifice. It is for charity, after all.)

I have my misgivings about this coming season of Chuck. What I've managed to stream from the first two seasons has been almost unfailingly adorable, witty and funny. However, a good half of the appeal was the parallels between the spies and the folks at the Buy More. Single best moment in the whole series? "Pineapple." It was a perfect union of the two halves of Chuck's life.

Now with Casey literally saying "Chuck me..." instead of dropping an f-bomb? Well. Let's say it wasn't auspicious. The whole idea behind the Chuck character was that he didn't want to be a spy. And we haven't seen it grow on him over time. Three episodes from the end of last season, he's holding a bad guy out a window yelling, "Of course I'm not going to drop you; that's a terrible thing to do!" as if he can't imagine anyone doing it. A twist of this magnitude doesn't bode well.

And isn't Morgan supposed to be in Hawaii or something? Oh well, it's six months later. Maybe we'll have stories about Morgan trying to open his own Hibachi restaurant.

And the number one character I want to see again? Lou. I want Chuck the super-spy to swoop in and save the salami smuggler (Not a pun for once; she was literally smuggling high-end deli meats.), kiss her on the cheek and say "We'll always have Burbank."

( Chuck vs. the Pink Slip. )

Well they've punched that reset button good and proper, but maybe now that they've done it the rest of the season will be okay.

Ah, the wiles of LiveJournal. Unless there's something to complain about, there's no reason to post.

( Oh why not? Chuck vs. the Three Words )

And I don't like how over-powered Chuck is. When the Intersect was just information and Chuck was still semi-helpless, it was okay. As a matter of fact, I really enjoyed it when he learned how to do little spy things, like in Chuck vs. the Dream Job when he goes to rescue Sam Beckett from Chevy Chase. But now it's like, "Quick, Chuck! Flash and pilot this helicopter!" "Flash and speak Chechnyan!" "Flash and make Julienne fries!"

EDIT: ( Chuck vs. el Angel de la Muerte )

I generally find myself more at ease when I have an interview lined up or, in this case, waiting to be scheduled. I find myself doing something that I have not done in quite some time.

I am sitting by the kitchen counter, having baked one of the ingredients for a simplified chocolate trifle.

The trifle I make isn't a true one, barely more than cake and cut fruit and whipped cream. But the cake is actual cake made out of chocolate and flour and water and eggs and the whipped cream is actual whipped cream that is made out of heavy cream, sugar and air.

I used to make it for my college friends all the time. This time, I'll have a proper trifle dish.

EDIT: ( Yay! )

Maybe it's the cough medicine talking, but I can't for the life of me think of any stage musical that has a good film version. 1776, Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Producers, they all suck...

Wait, West Side Story. It wasn't any worse than the original, I don't think. Oh, and that time when MTV filmed Legally Blonde just by pointing the camera at the stage. They did something similar for Les Mis once. Okay. Oh! And that recent British version of Jesus Christ: Superstar with all the minimalist French stuff. That was awesome.

I just saw Sherlock Holmes and, unfortunately, my cold medicine kicked into high gear right as the credits were playing, so if there wasn't actually a scene of Holmes sniffing dead Xenopus entrails, do let me know.

Overall, I liked it, but parts of the plot felt like they were borrowed from From Hell and the "we'll take it back" reference to the U.S. seemed like a cheap shot at getting American audiences involved in a British story. Bit of an insult to the ol' noggin. I think what I'm fuzzing over here is that Downey's performance was great and Law's performance was great but the logic of the movie was a bit lacking.

Whole thing redeemed itself in the end, though. Really had me going. But then they don't really hammer that it couldn't have been the other one. And then they forgot that rhododendrons are new world plants.

SUPPORT STACIE IS DOING A VAMPIRE AUCTION, YOU GUYS!

Bidding starts January 15. All vampire fandoms are welcome, but once again, I seem to be the only fan representing Underworld.

The Vampire Author Auction is open to fanfic authors in any fandom
which includes vampires. This includes (but is not limited to) fandoms
such as Twilight, Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood, Angel/Buffy,
Van Hellsing, Hellsing, Blade, Vampire Knight, Interview With A
Vampire, Bram Stoker and more!

Not a part of a vampire fandom but still want to participate? No
problem! First, keep in mind that we will still be holding the April
Author Auction for members of any and all fandoms (though it may be
taking place the last weekend of March due to some procedures Stacie
is having in April. More on this later.). Second, if you’d like to
participate in the Vampire Author Auction and you are able to
incorporate vampires into your auction fic, you’re welcome to join
us! Whether you write a Harry Potter/Twilight crossover or write a
Doctor Who fic which features Plasmavores, so long as vampires or
vampirism is a part of your story, you are welcome to participate in
this auction.

I guess they forgot that there are vampires in Harry Potter. One shows up at Slughorn's Christmas party. There are vampires in Tolkien, too. They're mentioned in passing in Silmarillion.

Anne Rice characters will be shot on sight.