Guys! Guys! Look!

A random google search brought me the following:

Being resourceful came in handy when Hyneman was about 14. He ran away from home for six months after his parents threatened to send him to reform school because of "unruly behavior." The adventure ended in California, where Hyneman spent a few days in juvenile detention until his parents brought him home.

(From The Christian Science Monitor 2006 Mythbusters profile)

Just imagine the face thingswithwings made when I read that out to her with appropriate emphasis on "resourceful" and "unruly behavior." JUST IMAGINE.

Now imagine the hooker AUs. Or the reform school AUs. Or Jamie's first time in California, when he ran away to San Francisco in 1970 as a boy of fourteen. OH MY GOD.

1. John John Not-John. This is the fannish equivalent of duck duck goose; the fan who is "it" goes around the outside of the circle, tapping heads and naming Jacks and Johns. John Sheppard, John Crichton, John Smith, DANIEL! This would be most amusing when somebody realized they could go around half the circle on Captain Jacks: Captain Jack (Sparrow), Captain Jack (Harkness), Captain Jack (Harkness, II), Captain Jack (O'Neill, pre-series, presumably), Captain Jack (Aubrey), Captain Jack (B5, season four), Captain Jack (the monkey), RODNEY!

2. Fannish Apples to Apples. thingswithwings and I are so doing this someday. Because: how awesome would apples to apples be, as a game, if we made our own fannish cards? Referencing, like, penguins! and aliens made them do it! And with little blurbs down at the bottom! It would be awesome, is what it would be. Imagine turning up, say, "aged" and getting "John Sheppard" "Methos" "We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other" and whateverall.

Sadly, the game only works if some of the cards are B-list. In the original, this is accomplished with cards like Adam Sandler; in our version, it would be B-list tropes, which I can't think of right now. But it would be those. Also B-list characters.

m_shell, talking to me about "Get Together": "Well, there was a version by Darth Brooks..."

Me: instantly attempts to do the heee-cooo breathing and hollow-voiced version of Get Together.

It was practically one of those "gay marriage is just like yours. Only gayer" commercials, except our version would go "Fannish marriage is just like yours. Only... more fannish."

And, having made it through lord alone knows how many Sentinel-bonding stories, I feel entitled to be random and post Funny IM Conversations. Because I know you all care what waywardwords and I think would happen if the actors in Top Gun were played by ducks, or what darthrami and I theorized about the NID's curtains. Or maybe just because I don't want to lose said randomness later.

Apparently swans and ducks are inherently funny, just like squid:

waywardwords: BEWARE THE SWAN!
eruthros: It is an EVIL swan.
waywardwords: Swans can be.
eruthros: It will eat all the ... whatever swans eat... so that others may starve.
waywardwords: Ravenous swans!
eruthros: Ravenous rampaging swans VS Godzilla!
waywardwords: lol.
eruthros: They destroy Tokyo!
eruthros: Again!
waywardwords: Next up: Mothra vs. the Angry Ducks!
eruthros: Mothra is so going down.
( Top Gun and Angry Ducks )

And when darthrami was over, we briefly talked about the fandoms that could actually support curtainfic. Later, on lj:

eruthros: Also? Maybourne totally has a crush on Jack O'Neill.
darthrami: :-)
eruthros: Seriously! I mean, he's always calling from the Cayman Islands and wanting to know how Jack's doing...
darthrami: ...
darthrami: does he ask about curtains?
eruthros: No.
eruthros: Usually he asks about the NID and if they're all managing to stay disentangled from the Shadow Government sorta thing.
darthrami: ahhhh
darthrami: does he ask about the shadow government's curtains?
( NID Curtainfic )

... especially on NC-17 slash stories.

Dedication: I want to thank my mother for her invaluable help with this story. She helps me even though she doesn't like slash stories.

I. There are no words.

m_shell and I watched the DVD of the London stage production of Oklahoma! recently. You know, the one with Hugh Jackman? We'd seen it before, but only as a bad PAL to NTSC dub that our prof smuggled out of England.

This led to some discussion about Wolverine playing Curly, as is wont to happen, and I had a sudden flash of Prof X as played by Patrick Stewart in wheelchair singing "the farmer and the cowman should be friends" and trying to stop fights between the two groups and, just, yah. Patrick Stewart. Prof X. Singing this:

"Ain't nobody gonna slug out anythin'. This here is a party!
Break it up ya' two ol' fools. All right, Andrew, sing it!
Dum-dah-dee-um-dum-dum!

and

I'd like to teach you all a little sayin'
And learn the words by heart the way you should
I don't say I'm no better than anybody else,
But I'll be damned if I ain't jist as good!

Is that not just perfect? I mean, see, Magneto is going around all Superman and Mutants Are the Next Generation and stuff, and Prof X is singing about being no better and no worse. Hee!

Sadly, since this is clearly based on movie!canon, one can't have Laurie played by Rogue, so it has to be Jean as Laurie and Scott as Judd, which is lame. And Rogue and Iceman can be Ado Annie and Will, and of course Pyro can be Ali Hakkkkiiiiiiiim.

Except there's no place for Magneto, except perhaps as Andrew, which is also lame.

Anyway.

My other pop culture stream-of-consciousness-casting-call for the day comes from a discussion with friede about this ... interesting post in which a Draco fan compares Draco to Lord Peter Wimsey. (Which led to this post wherin a rather famous HP author explains her Draco characterization and uses the phrase "Darth Wimsey." No, really.) After moments of "wtf?" and "but... but..." and "so the logic goes how again?" I tried to work out who the Malfoys are really like in the Wimsey oevre.

eruthros: Darth Wimsey my ASS.
friede: blerg.
eruthros: ... maybe the Duke, actually.
eruthros: *ponders Lucius and Narcissa as the Duke and Duchess*
friede: oh dear Gawd.
eruthros: See, and Lucius knows there's something going on with his dear brother (cousin) that he just can't match -- Sirius has that certain Gryffindorish something.
eruthros: Oh! Oh! And then! See, Lucius is imprisoned, and it could totally be all "Clouds of Witness" and Sirius (lala he's dead but whatever) saves him because it TURNS OUT that he wasn't in the Department of Mysteries to kill anyone, but to visit some Commoner Cutie Patootie with a mean jealous husband.
friede: *facepalm*
friede: FLEE
eruthros: Heh.
eruthros: Well, as that makes clear, it doesn't work on the SPECIFICS.
eruthros: But if I were comparing the Malfoys to a "type" from the LPW books, it would be the Duke, not Wimsey.

I have a sudden desire to cast everyone else, except for the problem where it doesn't work and there is no LPW equivalent in HP. And besides, who'd be Freddie Arbuthnot? The Gringotts goblins? Lame! And Peter's mother! How could anyone else be like the Dowager Duchess? And how in heaven could anyone be Bunter, good steadfast Bunter who brought Peter back from his shell-shock? Or Harriet? Because Harriet and Peter are so much individuals, at least after Strong Poison, when Peter stops being quite so much a cliche with a magnifying-glass monocle.

Hmmmm. Actually, that brings up an interesting point: I wonder if the people who compare Draco to Peter are the people who love the early novels and hate Gaudy Night? Because it does make some sense, rather. Are they looking at Peter as the detective-toff? The white-blond man of distinction, collector of elegant suits and first editions and Daimlers with long bonnets? Rather than as Peter, intelligent and incredibly neurotic and cheerfully ridiculous and learning what it means to be desperately in love? I mean, in that post you see Peter and Harriet's relationship referred to as "inevitable," when that's the last thing I'd consider it -- it's inevitable from the perspective of the series before we meet Harriet in SP. But once DLS starts turning Peter into a real person and writing Harriet? Well, no, because then the whole point is growth and change, and it's the exact opposite of inevitable.

*ponders*

During a conversation on Y!M with casira, the subject turned to stoppering death.

Now I want images made of all these things:

casira: Gah, I'm just racing through references now. Picturing (Neil's) Death with a cork in her mouth, grinning around it at a very annoyed Snape....
casira: "That didn't seem to help." *muffled but cheerful* "Nope!"
...
eruthros: Suddenly I see PTerry's Death in the I Dream of Jeannie bottle. All: WELL, MR SNAPE, YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT, BUT WERE THE HAREM PANTS REALLY NECESSARY?

( More Deaths. )

If only I had any artistic ability whatsoever.

Good heavens. Anyone who was looking for the ultimate example of bad show-v-tell, I've found it. It reads like badfic, but I swear it's intended to be all moving and stuff. Name not included to protect the really, really guilty.

'Was that the right call?' Jim wondered. 'Should I have stripped him and claimed him as My Guide there and then?'

Jim didn't know.

Jim couldn't imagine anything better than having Blair as his partner.

He was sad because he was pretty sure Blair didn't feel the same way.

*sniffles* Poor Jim! He's so sad! And you can tell he's sad because it says so. Right there. *points*

(Not even going into the whole My Guide thing. Because. Just. Good heavens.)

So it was down to something really freezing last night with the windchill and all. And you'd think that'd be a stumper for me, as a native Northern Californian, but really I don't have difficulty dealing with the cold. It's different, sure, but I'm not sitting there going "this is so wrong and I don't know how to deal! Ahhhh!" or anything. I mean, I already know the principles of dressing for the cold. No problem. I expected the cold to be an issue, but really, it's no big. I walked out and did shopping a while ago and was totally fine. In fact, I thought I'd somehow managed to hit the warm part of the day until I realized that there were ice crystals at the tip of my ponytail where my hair was still a little damp.

But the snow -- that is a stumper. I know how to deal with things that are wet and cold; it rains a lot in California. Wool, check. Wicking fibers, check. Waterproof over the top, check. But it sticks on the ground! It's white! You can't see a damn thing when it's coming down. People drive like maniacs. It ices over. It sticks to your clothes. It's just too weird. So that's gonna take some getting used to.

***
Do you ever get really grateful to finally see the 63/63 or 87/87 post of a long WIP? Not because you like the story and now there'll be a fun conclusion but because it's finally over and won't be spamming your inbox any more? And people won't be talking about it and quoting the whole damn post to say "wow!!!!! this is getting so good!!!"? I mean, sure, you can filter stuff straight to trash based on the story name, but not if you're on digest, and you still won't catch everything. That's why I left DIEF and DSX back in the day. Occasionally something good came through, but it was swamped by these ten or so teenage girls posting Fraser/Thatcher, and each of them would post six or seven times a day, and then when they finally got to part 87/87 and you breathed a sigh of relief there'd be a SEQUEL. Christ almighty.

This message brought to you by Some Harry Potter List, I Didn't Check Which.

***
Also, GIP. I haven't decided if I like this icon best, or if I prefer a different one, or what. The background's a double-hard mix; a single comes out a kinda silly purple. I also played with desaturating the background, no hard mix, and stuff like that... but I still don't know how I feel about it. Except that Zoe has two guns. Two. I'm doing a theme. *g*

Now I just need to track me down a OaT screencap from the ep "Drive, She Said." You know. The one where Mac and Vic and Dobrinsky all pull new guns on each other every ten seconds? But I can only find screencaps for the first three episodes, so I may have to settle for just a boring ol' John Woo two-guns moment.

On the other hand, during the search I found Vic/Mac/Dobrinsky kink!fic set during same episode. The concept appears to be that during all the fighting padded handcuffs get involved. Pretty unlikely, but that unlikeness is so trumped by the fact that Dobrinksy's involved that I'm just gonna ignore it. Because Dobrinsky? Dobrinksy? *mind boggles*

Grrrrrr. Tinhats on list drive me bonkers.

Notjumpingin. Notjumpingin. Someone else will say what I would. I don't want to spend the whole day defending a position that should not have to be defended. Not jumping in. Really, really not.

Really, really not.

Well, maybe I'll just write a post just in case no-one else says these things. But I won't post it. Really. Really.

Oh, damn.