To Read Makes Our Speaking English Good

marriedtothesea.com

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

thekiwi   gave me these:

Fried Pickles:
Mmm, mmm good! The best state fair food ever. Also, there's a restaurant in Springdale, AR called AQ Chicken that makes the best fried dill pickles and calls them "pickelos." It's a seriously tasty snack.

Strong Women:
Badass, honest, empathetic, competent, classy, and engaging. Everyone says Joss writes "Strong Woman Characters," but actually he writes the strong characters (women) described in this awesome essay. On the real world front, strong women are everywhere just waiting to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Most Awesome Show Ever. No discussion, no arguments, no nothing. Captured my imagination many years ago and continues to relate to pretty much everything I think about and/or do on an almost daily basis. I've seen every episode at least 10 times (and some of them even more) and even though I laugh before the lines are even spoken, I always come away from a viewing with some new angle to think about within the wider philosophy that is Buffy. It's my One True Fandom forever.

Oklahoma: 
A considerably cooler place since it decided to designate the Flaming Lips song "Do You Realize?" as official state rock song this week. Also, McNellie's Irish Pub is pretty darn cool; last week, I attended a Scotch whisky tasting and four course dinner there. It was heaven. Despite all the batshit crazy wingnuts who seem to be running the political show these days, it's pretty okay right now.

Reading, England:
What, you want me to put it into words? Okay, here goes: 

Pubs, Football, Cricket, Rain,Italy, Scotland, Ireland, Night of Infamy, Three Tuns, Mojo's, 3Sixty, RUCU, The Fez, Cider, Wales, Harry Potter, Wordsworth, Bloomsbury, Erotoplatonicism, Master and Commander, Love Actually, dance your pants off, Wessex Hall, camp, House Parties, Easter fry-up, Ring Night, Boat Party, London, Jerry Springer: The Opera, Oleanna, Aaron Eckhart, Jumpers, Hamlet, RSC in Stratford, Wednesday Night/Union Night, Marlboro Reds, Anti-Dolphin.org, Humans Rule!, Monty Python, Little Britain, Eh Eh Eh, "But I'm a lady", "but I'm the only gay in this village", "dead as a dodo, prime minister", 10 Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, THE PREMIER, Lucious Malfoy, Van Helsing, Dracula, Hammer films, James Whales, the Wokies, Rahim stores, Unwins, the BP, Pimms, Alcopops, cybernetics, meteorology, the Dr.s Ivy, Mrs. Lynch, Aunty Suzanne, the Isle of Skye, Loch Ness, Dover Castle, secret wartime tunnels, Dover Beach, Tintern Abbey, the Vatican City, Florence, Venice, double decker buses, the NIGHT BUS!, Westminster Bridge (timmy's bridge).

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February 23, 2009

Dear MTV: 

Please explain in detail why you have yet to release a complete set of the show that made countless gals navigating high school in the late 90s feel just a little bit less like freaks and a lot more like the kick-ass just-wait-until-I-hit-college-you-assholes heroines they were? The show otherwise known as Daria?

I know many people, myself included, who would pay good money to purchase an official DVD set, even one without all the useless bells and whistles (I believe some people call this "commentary") that accompany other such sets. Just the episodes would be great. The producers and distributors of that other show we idolized long before yours came along figured out that if you'll package it, we will come. What's the hold up?

I say we're willing to pay good money, but what I really mean is that if you can get it together and throw us a bone, maybe some of us will have found jobs and then we'll be ready to shell out the $70 you'll no doubt charge for said box sex set. Until then, we'd really appreciate having some D to watch that isn't "Is It Fall Yet?" and "Is It College Yet?" Because this is a recession, yo, and some of us need to laugh.

And Megavideo sucks.

Thanks,
A

Wow. Was Pipe-Wrench Fight really the last thing I posted here? That's just sad. I'm trying to remember where the rest of October, November, December and January went. It's all one big hazy ball of holidays and cross-country moves.

Thanks for the pokey reminder about LJ, jules1278 . Sorry it took a few weeks to sink in :).

Random Fandom Things Currently Rocking My World:

Only 20 days left, America. Who will it be?

I don't usually like cross-posting, but this one is kind of relevant to both sites and I want these two collections to be recommended everywhere because they're so much fun. So here goes...

Let's kick off this Halloween season, shall we? Alas, no Halloween Movie Fest for me this year, as I don't happen to be living with T & SA anymore. But I've modified the October ritual to my personal liking, having decided to focus on a wide range of vampire stories from all different literary eras. Aiding me in this endeavor are two volumes of surprising merit (I say surprising because I haphazardly picked them up from the entrance display at B&N), both of which compliment one another in ways I failed to notice until coming home. More on that in a second, but I have to say that it reminded me that there are people who know and love books working at B&N--probably former English majors practicing daily guerrilla warfare on an unsuspecting public in the fight to make people actually think about what they read--and it's one such person who put these two volumes next to one another.

Volume #1: Vampires, Wine, and Roses: Chilling Tales of Immortal Pleasure
I know, I know. It sounds like a schlocky romance novel, right? It's really, really not. It's just an incredibly cheesy title for an otherwise impressive collection. Edited by John Richard Stephens, this book has vampire stories from expected and very unexpected sources: Ann Rice, Voltaire, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Baudelaire, T.S. Elliot, Edith Wharton, Stephen King, Lord Byron, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson, and more. If you're anything like me, you're probably looking at this list and thinking "but _____ didn't write about vampires!" Yes, he/she did! This volume contains poetry, prose, song lyrics, and excerpts from longer novels. It's also--get this!--fully illustrated by Vince Locke. Check out the cover: V, W, & R Cover.

Volume #2: Women of the Night
To be perfectly honest, I bought this volume based solely on the fact that it included Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" in a vampire compilation. Because that's exactly where it should be. The only thing that would be even better were if it showed up in a collection that included some Angela Carter stories as well. Anyway, WotN focuses specifically on female vampires. As John Helfers points out in the Introduction, many scholars treat the vampire myth as something that sprung up in the 18th/19th century with the rise of Gothic Revival. Certainly, Dracula made a huge impact on the literary world. But female vampires have been featured in texts for a couple thousand years and have developed different mythic characteristics than their male counterparts. This collection features contemporary authors telling female vampire stories--Neil Gaiman, Philip K. Dick, Nancy Holder, Jane Yolen, etc.

What I didn't realize until reading the introduction of Women of the Night was that many of the stories referenced by Helfers and the writers featured in this book are included in Vampires, Wine, and Roses. So when he claims that an author's story borrows from Keats' Lamia, I can simply grab VW&R and--presto!--there's the poem (instead of having to drag out the book boxes and dig for my Norton Anthology, or try to track down what may or may not be a complete copy of the text on Google).

So the opening story in VW&R is a 1984 story by Ann Rice called "The Master of Rampling Gate." And it's everything a neo-gothic 20th century vampire story should be--sensual, melodramatic, a little bit ridiculous, and very, very sexy. You know...gothic. Here's an excerpt:


I leave you with a macro made by someone far cooler than myself after a particularly fun viewing of Interview with the Vampire: 



Happy Halloween!

I very rarely miss having cable. But I always miss Aqua Teens. Especially the Moonanites:

According to MediaPost, anyway. The article is filled with all sorts of interesting little facts about American porn viewage on teh internets. Be sure to scroll down to the "Red State, Blue State" stats for even more fun facts. But my favorite part of the researcher's findings has been nicely summarized by Xbiz.com:

In honor of the study:

The award goes to Bones for casting David Gallagher as the son of a transgendered preacher in this week's episode. Yes, that's the same David Gallagher who played Simon Camden on the unbelievably cheesy and yet sneakily addictive 7th Heaven.

That is a serious casting win!

So Rev. Fred posted this really interesting video of Margaret Thatcher pwned by a British housewife while answering questions about the Falklands crisis. Thatcher's exchange with the British citizen is fantastic because it's a direct question from a real person about a foreign policy decision. :



And it reminded me almost immediately of Harriet Jones, Prime Minister, shooting down the Sycorax ship in season two and the Doctor's ability to follow through on the threat to take down her administration with six words. This Harriet Jones sequence has always bothered me. It seems rather petty for the Doctor to stoop so low as to play up society's eagerness to judge women on their appearance instead of their political decisions and leadership ability in order to teach Harriet a lesson:



Which then made me think of this Fox News segment where Sarah Palin tries to beg off her completely disastrous performance in the Katy Couric interview with a pathetic "it was rigged!" excuse. She's basically sulking because Katy didn't feel the need to spend an hour talking about all those non-existent Obama tax increases and instead "clobbered" her with really hard ones like "what newspapers do you read":



Shielding politicians from the questions of the general public really kills Democracy better than any PR spin ever will. Couric didn't ask Palin anything unreasonable or even particularly hard in her interview. Neither did Gwen Ifill during the VP debates this week. And yet Palin has felt the need on both occasions to say the equivalent of "f*ck you" to both of them, though it was even more appalling when she said it to Ifill's face on Thursday. "Talking straight to Americans" does not include repeating the same five talking points (as illustrated by the Sarah Palin Debate Prep Flowchart).

Furthermore, there are still way too many asshat male pundits out there still making off-handed comments about her supposed hotness and female pundits claiming she's "relateable" because she has kids (as if Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi didn't raise kids, too!) and meanwhile the rest of us are trying not to panic because this politician obviousy has little to no idea how to answer a simple question even if she doesn't "feel like it," let alone what it takes to be second in line to run the country!

So basically I wish we could set Sarah Palin down in a room and have real, live citizens ask her questions that she answers directly. Even if the answers are bad, at least she can't claim the media is "filtering" them and it would a hell of a lot harder for her to look an average citizen in the eye and say "I'm not going to answer your question" without suffering the wrath of public opinion. And then I wish the media would do it's job and analyze her answers, not her glasses or her hair or her dress or her kids or her husband.

Is that too much to ask?

Q. What's a Blue Hawaiian? 

A. A really strong blue cocktail served in a monkey head glass. Two of those and you end up thinking "Whoa! Why am I naked and who are all these people?"

Courtesy of one Sealey Booth :).

nataliedee.com

This is absolutely fantastic:



Also, in other random links, this site is mildly amusing as well: Barak Obama Is Your New Bicycle

Lunch time, lunch time. Doo-dee-doo. Snagged this morning meme from ninja_turbo 

( The I-Really-Dig-This-Lush-Perfume Meme ) </lj>

Tradition t-shirt from the Wailing List

"Do all boys keep their masterbatory aids in their shoes?"

Heh. Thanks, Bones.

Booth to Bones: I'm all over your real world. Why would you want me in your fantasy world, too?

Um, dude. David Boreanaz can get all up in my fantasy world anytime. Srsly.

Edit: Completely OT, but does anyone else love Sweets as much as I do right now? He started out as a nice diversion, the cute little Freaks and Geeks refugee who gave us some comic relief. Now he's just moving into awesomeness territory.

Edit 2: Watching Bush explain the economic crisis. He is so full of shit. Deregulation has just screwed us over and he's suddenly all about the socialism. I hate the world right now.

Twas tagged by the ever-fabulous jules1278 : 

* Each blogger starts with ten random facts/habits about themselves.
* Bloggers that are tagged write on their own blog about their ten things and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog, choose ten people to get tagged and list their names.

( Enter teh random weirdness about me meme )