5 posts tagged “tv”
What television show stands the test of time?
Firefly does, more than, IMNSHO, any other Joss Whedon show (although Buffy's "Once More With Feeling" is admittedly brilliant). Firefly has a detailed 'verse with well-rounded characters (Simon, Simon, Simon -- you are so beautiful, and so selflessly dedicated, and so brilliant, and this sweet young thing follows you around with the very warmest of intentions, and you then stab her by saying something amazingly offensive) whose destinies you actually care about. Sure, there were only fourteen episodes -- so it never had time to jump the shark.
But I think I can now confidently award the Earliest Appearance of a Very Difficult Student medal to someone I teach English with. Yes, I can.
My officemate gave a quiz with this question:
True or false? The following is a good, arguable thesis statement: A healthy heart is the key to a healthy life.
This was a T/F quiz question about thesis statements, right? But one guy emailed my officemate and complained. He felt that "it doesn't matter how healthy your heart is" -- that one's Lord alone determines the length of one's life, not, say, fatty sclerosis, infarcts, what have you.
This is great news, my friends. Unless you're a cardiologist, in which case apparently you're in league with Satan.
A little earlier today, Doug was watching a cooking show with great interest, on which a Chinese gentleman -- Martin Yu? I want to say -- was making a Macanese dish with okra, tomatoes, onions, and dried shrimp as the major ingredients. The chef explained that tomatoes are called, in Chinese, "berries from the West." I don't know whether he was speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, but he pronounced the word (approximately, with a rising tone on the first syllable and a low tone on the second) "FUN-keh."
Well! This makes me see tomatoes in a completely new light. Song lyrics like "We got the tomatoes / Gotta have the tomatoes" by Tomatodelic, for instance, as they and sister band Parliament chronicle the eternal battle between Dr. Tomatostein and Sir Nose D'VoidoTomatoes. Or consider: "Make my tomatoes the P-Tomatoes / I wants to get tomatoed up."
The Demuth Museum just hung its silver-anniversary exhibit, and I'm having a tug of war between really wanting to go Now Now Now, and still having this stupid virus. I mean, it's not like they're taking the exhibit away on Monday. It's just that I have a reason for wanting to immerse myself in Demuth as quickly as possible... all will become clear by Monday. Really.
What is your favorite children's movie?
Classic: The Wizard of Oz. Before VCRs were sold for home use (yes, chilluns, there was in fact such a time), my sister and I would sit in front of the TV every year when they broadcast this and basically not breathe until it was over. We had 12" articulated dolls of the main characters that came through the Sears catalog. Don't ask me what ever became of the Dorothy doll's ruby slippers. I don't know.
Also: Mary Poppins. If you can get past Dick Van Dyke's Worst. Cockney Accent. Ever, you've got a bird/Julie Andrews duet; a man pinned to his ceiling by laughter; animated characters in one particularly surreal bit; the haunting song "Feed the Birds, Tuppence a Bag" and Michael's decision about his own tuppence; and Mrs. Banks, in a departure from the books, being an early feminist. What more could you want? On top of all this, you get a song about how it's cool to know big words.
Modern: Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It's debatable how much of this is really a kiddie film, given the hundred and one in-jokes, visual and otherwise -- e.g. Gromit's heroic stand in a Sopwith Camel (Snoopy's plane of choice in his WWI flying ace persona) being chased by a Fokker (the Red Baron's triplane; one mean mother Fokker) against the titular beast in a King Kong homage. There's also a long, long buildup that pays off in one moment where Wallace, inexplicably having sprouted rabbit ears and now chomping a carrot instead of his beloved Wensleydale, notices Gromit's worried gaze and remarks, "Eh, what's up, dog?"
Anyway, in matters unrelated to film, I tried on a new bra today that I really should have tried on in the store. It purports to be a minimizer, which I thought would be great, as there's a lot of me up top and I try to avoid the dreaded Blouse Gap. You top-heavy ladies know what I mean: the straining-buttons look. It is not attractive, no. This thing cinches tight, the way I imagine a binder or corset must feel, and it's false advertising! It's not a minimizer so much as a Jetson Family Rocket Cone Titty Bra. Seriously, they look like NASA nipples, as if you could come up behind me, press one of my vertebrae (please don't; my back is in Ernesto-related agony, still), and fire One and Two as weapons in the direction of some enemy. The whole look and concept is so amazingly like something that would happen to Number Six in The Prisoner that I'm wondering why a young Patrick McGoohan hasn't yet climbed up my balcony. I'll be ready for him with the torpedo titties when he does.
(Also, I've learned that Ernesto, painful though he is, has been downgraded to a "tropical depression." Okay, I'll put on my Hawaiian shirt and cry.)
So I finished all my smegging grades, right? All of them. The five-week summer term is now officially over; I've logged into the university server, put the grades into the mainframe, and filled out a form on each of my 36 students explaining their grades in painstaking detail. The intent of this program is so beautiful and the bureaucracy that attends it is so ugly.
Anyway, I sat down with my husband to listen to Eddie Izzard on Internets radio -- Dressed to Kill just never gets old for me -- while at the same time half-watching BBC America to see if something interesting would cross the screen.
The commercials were on. And right after a commercial for Tampax Pearl, the brand-new "upgrade" tampon with a "no-slip grip" on the applicator -- apparently a lot of US women are finding themselves unusually slippery these days -- right after this tampon commercial, there came one of those wannabe-artsy Honda Infiniti commercials. You know, the one where a giant splash of red paint flows across the screen?
People pay no attention to semiotics these days, I tell ya.
While adding stripedsocks as a friend (and a particularly excellent one, too; she's one of my favorite knit wits, one who keeps practicing on me with fabulous results, and she saves the lives of doggies and kitties every day), I ended up with two simultaneous earworms bellowing triumphantly in my head:
- Joe Raposo, "Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood," Sesame Street
- Fred Rogers, theme song, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood ("It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, it's a beautiful day for a neighbor / Would you be mine, could you be mine?")
And naturally, I can't help but remember how much Mom loved the musical output of both men (lots of people cried when Mr. Rogers died, but Mom cried when Raposo died as well), and that makes me flash on bringing her commemorative newspaper and magazine articles about Fred Rogers in the hospital. She loved him, truly and purely, and put him up there on her mental shelf of bodhisattvas right alongside the Dalai Lama. I'm not going to claim he was otherwise.
I do own a red zip-up cardigan and red sneakers, but I've never begun a class by doing the whole routine, mainly because part of it involves throwing the "grownup shoes" in the air and catching them. And, like Krist Novoselic at the 1995 MTV Music Awards, I'm great with the throwing part, but not so much with the catching. (At the end of the performance, while Cobain and Grohl were enthusiastically putting mic stands through amps and whatnot, Novoselic clocked himself on
the head with his own bass. Owies.)
