eruthros

Things that you should totally not spend your Sunday doing: a guy on youtube has posted the entirety of QI series C (3).

Well, at least, you shouldn't ALSO spend your Sunday doing that, since I've already done it. Not all twelve episodes or anything, but I've watched a good bit of QI today, and been astonished when none of the contestants knew what a taffy pull or a Myoclonic jerk is. People! That's not hard! That's not like when Stephen Fry asks "what was the capital of England for five days in thirteen-something?"

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Also, you should definitely not spend several hours poking around the Threadless stock lists, just because their t-shirts are almost all on sale for $10, through tomorrow. Even though Threadless is fabulous cool, and even though the women's tees are printed on American Apparel shirts and thus ridiculously cheap at $10. Seriously: don't spend several hours at it, and get distracted by all the designs you haven't scored recently, and wonder why people keep posting things with violent robots, or oddly sketchy alien-like creatures. Instead, think about how much you want Real Men Drink Tea to be printed, because then you can have a t-shirt with a pirate! Drinking tea!

Things that continue to astonish me: MacGyver and Seinfeld were on TV at the same time. Overlapped for years, even. And the last MacGyver movie was after the X-Files' first season. I'm surprised by this every time I see the dates, because I think of MacGyver as such an 80s show. (I mean, the mullet! And people saying "man" all the time! And the synthesizer theme song! And the commies! And the outfits! What do you mean it was in its seventh season in 1992?)

This observation brought to you by an episode from the sixth season of MacGyver, featuring phrases like "crack doesn't care about the law!" and "so I called a few street sources and put out a big carrot" and "hey man, that's an uzi!" "now it's a wrench."

(fiatlouis and I discovered today that we both wanted to be MacGyver when we grew up. Unfortunately, neither of us can turn an uzi into a wrench. But we think we probably turned out okay even though we never learned how to make bombs from bamboo.)

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Also, I continue to get pissier and pissier about lj. "Hey, paid users, you won't have to see ads, just sponsorship information!" I call bullshit.

Also, my reaction to "sponsored features" is exactly the opposite of what they want; my immediate response to the first sponsored community, for a movie, that I saw on the lj homepage ("but it's not an ad honest!") was to say "well, crap, and I'd kinda wanted to see that, and now I'm not gonna." Yep, I'm that kind of San Francisco Bay Arean: I do practically need a list of companies to avoid (when Philip Morris buys organic food labels, it gets really confusing) and I have no problem adding to it. This isn't that kind of reasoned choice, though -- not on the "avoiding tobacco companies" scale -- it's just a knee-jerk reaction to an ad in a space where I shouldn't be seeing ads.

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Poll! Also at the Disco! Okay, maybe not. See, I continue to hear hilarious things on campus. (Including not one but two additional, separate occasions on which Latte Boy tried to flirt with the two girls from the last post and stuck his foot in his mouth.) And I think they're funny. But if I post them every couple days, y'all might get sick of them. So! Poll.

[Poll #833611]

After reading all the comments on this post by rachelmanija, I've been thinking about cult tv that I watched as a kid. I saw a lot of these in reruns or syndication, obviously, since some of them were canceled before I was born.

Things I watched as a kid that I can't stand now:
Knight Rider. I saw ten minutes of a recent rerun. Good god is that some bad tv. On the other hand, the car is cool.

Automan. I mean, it's got some fun stuff going on, but in retrospect Automan is an ass. And where are the girls? On the other hand, the car is cool.

Things I watched as a kid that I wish were out on DVD, if only for renting:
The Fantastic Journey. Okay, see, this was like 1977, and all these people from various times got stuck in the Bermuda Triangle and had to travel from zone to zone trying to get home. And Roddy McDowall plays a bored evil 1960s scientist, and there's a sorta proto-Troi half-Atlantean half-extraterrestrial telepathic princess, and there's a Doctor from the Future who is also, natch, telepathic, and cures people with a magical tuning fork. And there are all the Standard Sci-Fi Favorites: the city of children, and the city run by women, and so on. Wheee! I remember it as being kitsch and fun and ridiculous, rather than groan-worthy. Also I wrote drawerfic for it at the age of eight.

Probe. I've talked about Probe before. It rocked, and I'm really happy that I have it on tape now. And I showed it to other people, and they liked it too, so it's obviously not just my nostalgia talking.

The Phoenix. Giggle-worthy. Wosshisname who played Absalom on X-Files played an alien with a Quest who unfortunately had a touch of amnesia. Also he was being hunted by ... some government organization. Also he got his powers from the sun. Also he made motorcycles jump police roadblocks. Whee!

Galactica: 1980. So bad. So, so bad. Bad to the gazillionth power. So ridiculous. With the time-travel and the villain trying to make the Nazis win WWII and flying motorcycles and invisble vipers and the excessively soft-focus child-genius. So bad it deserves to be immortalized on DVD and laughed at in perpetuity. It has one mildly redeemable episode: a flashback with Starbuck, who crash-landed on a planet and made friends with a Cylon.

Things I'm astonished are out on DVD:
Buck Rogers. Okay, I watched it. Even unto its second season, yea, when a character who had feathers for hair showed up. The lead actress changed hair color halfway through the show -- no big, except that it was partway through filming an episode. She's blond! She's brunette! She's blond again! Villains spontaneously come back to life! I wouldn't mind seeing bits of it again, even, if I were feeling in need of a laugh. But I had no idea that it had enough of a fan base to end up on DVD. (Plus Battlestar Galactica was way better.)

Planet of the Apes. Again, I watched it. And Roddy McDowall delivered an excellent performance. Really, though, it was h/c fic without enough of the c. I mean, Character A is kidnapped! The apes plan non-FDA approved scientific experimentation! With evil drugs! Characters B and C must save him! Next Friday, Character B will be kidnapped! And tortured to reveal the Human Conspiracy! Woe! I'm not saying it was worse than the other sf/f tv I watched (see above re: Knight Rider), but why does it get a full release on DVD when some of my favorites don't?

And of course I watched the usual suspects: Quantum Leap, the reason I kept expecting every episode of Sliders to end "oh, boy." Red Dwarf. Battlestar Galactica. The Prisoner, the show so baffling it prompted a Straight Dope answer (which is, btw, completely spoilerific, if you can spoil the end of The Prisoner). Star Trek: TOS.

I saw at least a few episodes of: The Bionic Woman -- which apparently doesn't have enough of a cult following to be out on DVD. I didn't care for it much, but I thought other people did. Lost in Space (obviously in syndication). The Incredible Hulk -- eh.

I actually never saw: the 1987 Beauty and the Beast, which I wish was out on DVD -- people tell me it was great fun.

You know, with a background that included both PotA and Battlestar Galactica, a girl could be forgiven for writing total melodrama.

m_shell and I have been doing the tv-from-Netflix thing (fun! far, far cheaper than getting HBO and Showtime!) and recently received the first disk of The L-Word.

And. I mean, we've only watched the pilot so far but. Ugh. This has been getting rave reviews and called controversial and tons of people say they like it, but it's basically a soap opera with more sex. And lesbians.

And most of the sex we see isn't even queer! I mean, the pilot introduces us to (la la spoilers ahead la) a lesbian couple suffering bed death (that's not a stereotype or anything, nope) and a het couple with a really nice guy who have sex a couple times but then the girl is STOLEN AWAY by an EXOTIC LESBIAN. With an accent, yet. Just before her boyfriend proposes. Oh, and one can't forget Shane, the evil heart-breaking lesbian. Oh, or the way the LBD couple who want a kid try to trick a guy into making one of 'em pregnant even though neither one of 'em likes boys. Hey, that's some hot sex. Or not. A threesome with total ick. End result: more sex with boys in the pilot that sex with girls. What's up with that?

Notice that none of the lesbians who get to have sex is... a good person? (Actually, I didn't like any of 'em except one half of the couple and the straight guy, who was uber-nice, but somehow I don't think they're going to hook up. I mean, far be it from me to rule out ridiculous plot points in soaps, but that seems a bit too far.)

So, it's basically Sex and the City, except with lesbians. They sit around a table in a coffee shop and gossip a lot about who's having sex with whom. And about how you have to trim your pubic hair to have self-confidence. (As we all know, one cannot be self-confident without bodily modification.) Fun.

Actually, my personal favorite comment on it comes from this Netflix review. This fellow gave it five stars and said: "For all their brilliance, accomplishments, and fantastic careers, the characters on the show, when they aren't actually having sex, have nothing on their minds but lesbianism, the women they lust after, and their lesbian friends. Just as in real life, these lesbians run the gamut from very attractive to drop-dead gorgeous. Even the most masculinized of them are non-threatening, appealingly pouty tomboys. None of them are man-haters. If you want to see beautiful women kissing, flirting with, fantasizing about, and having sex with women (all tastefully done of course), this is the show for you."

It's like... lesbians are such a Weird Thing that surely all they do is Lesbianish. They don't ever, like, talk about politics, or about makeup (except how to use it to pick up girls), or about the World Series.

End grumpy Feminist-Queer Moment.

I adore the dS2 soundtrack. Except for "Nobody's Girl," which makes me bless computer CD players with handy "never ever play this track again" features. Strangely, though, I seem to have misplaced the dS1 soundtrack. Hey, did I maybe loan it to any of y'all?

I hadn't looked for it for a while, because I was dSed-out, but recently I addicted m_shell, who's watching from the beginning and thinks Ray Vecchio is fabulous. She's always saying "no, look, he pretends to be such a bad ass, but for Fraser he's a marshmallow inside." Suddenly, I'm in the dS mood again. Chase scenes to Sarah McLachlan! Conversations in the closet! And with dead people! A TV show with magical realism! (At least in seasons 1+2; I don't think I'd call the anti-physicsness of season 3+4 magical realism exactly. Not that I'm badmouthing RayK. He's fab.) I couldn't wait until we got to VS to see the reactions of m_shell and my other housemate. And also because I suddenly realized I hadn't seen VS in ages.

Funnily enough, m_shell isn't sure she wants to keep watching after the second season, because I warned her than RayV is going away. I'm all "no, RayK is okay. Really." I hope t'god we don't recreate the Ray Wars in my own house. That would just be going too far.